Suggestions.
gjmacd
considering building my own solution because
I figured this was something that could be done easily, and thankfully
I found you guys...
What I was looking for was pretty much what you do. A way to print out
a customized "paper" that I could take with me
and read on my commute or around the house when I didn't have
connectivity or was able to use my computer. Perfect!
With that said, after using your service...
Its not quite there (yet). There are some things that I think are
missing or just not working right.
Since I'm a software person, and own my own software company, I always
appreciate people helping me by giving me
feed back and suggestions, I figure since I'm not paying for the
service (which is free), I would give back by trying to
assist and provide feed back and suggestions to your service.
Most of them I'm sure you're aware of, but maybe I'll help by
Here they are...
1. Make sure its more like a "newspaper" and how a paper is formatted
and organized. Not just how its printed.
Right now, it appears that the articles I've selected in my feeds are
put into the paper in no particular order.
So if I have:
- Sports
- News
- Weather
The output of the paper is not organized in any manner in which I've
selected articles to print.
I think its best to follow an organization of articles that the user
(me) can setup.
Organize the output as the feeds are organized. Title the section,
create a new page and then go.
If you're worried about wasting paper, DON'T because reading the paper
becomes tedious and not useful
if you cannot find or read it with some organization or feel like you
can. Also, even though I (the person
who created the paper) know the order and articles that are being
printed, if I hand that to someone else
to read... they're going to be lost. You want to create a paper that
someone can pick up and read just
as if they were buying this off a news stand -- or at least strive for
getting "close" to that ergonomic.
Its frustrating to be reading a paper thats all over the place with
content and
completely mixed up... Reading World News next to a local article is
just not going to work.
Create sections and organize the articles in them as they were setup
by the user and you've fixed this
problem.
2. Make the organization menu (tree) more flexible. Maybe use an Ajax
control in there to allow for
dragging an dropping and re-ordering -- or create a better means of re-
organization of your articles / publishers.
3. (Bug) Not all articles seem to appear in the paper -- just the RSS
headlines. This appears to me to be a "bug" of sorts.
When I select some feeds from a local site that I want, I don't always
get the full article. I sometimes get ONLY the headline
from the feed, and nothing more. I realize this could be a limitation
of the standardized RSS format that the provider passes
to you, but you have to understand that if ONLY the headline is going
to appear, it might make sense to provide options to
the user to allow them to make a choice to print it or not, or better,
maybe just print all those "headlines" in a special section
that is indicated as such and don't put them in with full articles, or
have an option to NOT print articles that are just headlines.
Anyway, if you're printing a paper, you want the FULL article. Not
the headline.
Just these three suggestions / issues right now, as I find more, I'll
send them in.
But its a good service and you've got something interesting here and
useful. Keep up the good work!
Gary
Jonas Martinsson (FeedJournal)
1. Publisher supports sections, so it is something that will be added
to Reader as well.
2. Good suggestions, I'll keep that in mind.
3. Could you please provide the URL of the feeds you are having
problems with?
Jonas.