If anyone has any questions or comments, let me know.

Yay!  Well done, you guys.  : )

Guess I can retire my grunge 'zine now.  ; )

You don't have to retire it.  Just move it over to the new format.  :)

Easy, fast and fun. I guess I'll have to put away the quill and parchment. That is fine though,at my age the candle light makes it hard to see anyway  ;-)

I made a magazine called Parenting Power: How to be a Super Mom or Dad. Think it has legs?

Jen, I love it!  How was it setting it up?

I believe that will be an option later~ this is just beta.

Apollo, first, thanks for bringing this up.  What you want to do is go to the http://beta.printcasting.co... site and click the blue "Publish Your Stories" button.  You can then set up a new blog or use your blog from here.  If you'd like to use your existing material, go to your blog here at http://people.bakersfield.c... and scroll down until you see the "subscribe" option on the left.  If you click the RSS 2.0 option, you'll get to this page: http://people.bakersfield.c...  That's the one you want to enter.

Once your feed is in the system, you can go to your Printcast or create a new one that will use this feed.  You only need 7 articles to publish a Printcast and they can come from 1 feed or 2 feeds or 7 feeds.

Let me know if that helps or if you're getting stuck someplace.  We just launched Friday so we really need feedback on what works and what doesn't.

Cool~ I will have to play around a bit~ and obviously read those instructions a bit more thoroughly.

Yeah, me too.  I have a bunch of distractions right now.  Will check it out more closely tonight.

I think I'll make my magazine about my fantasy life.  It's the only thing I got big enough to fill a magazine. ; )

Sage, it's my job to make sure you don't have to read the instructions.  ;)

I see no place to add my feed in Printcasting.

The feeds page is not intuitive at all.

Feeds seem to me to be an awkward way to add one's own content.  Too little control. 

Suppose I take three from my own feed.  What prints?  The most recent three?  If I write one and publish again, are the next most recent two repeated?

ApollowDawn: You can also post content directly on Printcasting.com. When you click the "Publish Your Stories" button, choose the "Create a blog for me" option. You can start a blog right on Printcasting.com that you can post to whenever you like by clicking the "Post to My Blog" link that will appear in the orange bar at the top of the page when you're signed in.

We're also working on the ability for you to choose individual articles to appear in a Printcast. I think that combined with the ability to post articles, will give you what you're asking for. We hope to put out the ability to choose individual articles soon. Check the Printcasting blog for updates -- there's a lot more on the way!

Thanks to all of you for helping us test things out.

-Dan Pacheco, Founder of Printcasting

Oh and to answer your other question, only the most recent articles in feeds you choose get published in each subsequent edition. There is no duplication. Note also that for the time being, articles that contain less than 700 characters of text are not carried into Printcasts. Since the Printcasts are presented as magazines, only content that works as a good magazine article is pulled in. We are planning to allow people to classifiy feeds that have only photos so that they can flow into photo templates, event blogs flow into event calendars, and that sort of thing.

Thank you very much; it sounds like fun.

I can now hope that Save Draft works over there.  ;)

A clue to the Save Draft problem may be the number of posts that a person has made.  It just stopped working recently over at Tehachapi; it hasn't worked for a long time at KernPoet, but started working at KernPoet again after Alicen (co-writer) deleted a lot of her material.

Ha :-) I have been involved with Bakersfield community stuff long enough to know intimately what you are talking about with Save Draft. We're using Drupal as our back-end and I'm not sure if Save Draft is built into Drupal blogs, but I will check now. We really prefer that Bakersfield.com users simply blog here and register their feeds, though. Our goal is not to get people to blog somewhere else. The "create a blog for me" option is primarily for people who don't have a blog, or any online content to speak of.

Still can't find how or where to add my feed at the part of the setup where feeds are selected. 

There is no place anywhere in the publication setup process to enter http://people.bakersfield.c...

I do appreciate what you are doing and in taking part in pioneering this project.  :)

Apollo, you need to head back to the first page beta.printcasting.com and click here:

That should take you to this page: http://beta.printcasting.co...

When you get there, you should see two choices.  Click the button next to "Use my existing external blog feed" and you should get something like this:

Enter your http://people.bakersfield.c... here and that should do it.

I guess I still need to create my own magazine. I'm still not sure what kind of magazine to create, though. I have ideas in my head; I just can't decide which one sounds like it will work the best. I'm not sure if I'll get to it this week or not 'cause I'm in recovery mode from my birthday and have homework due this week, so I need to bite the bullet and get some of this done now before I spend more time on Printcasting.

If Dan is still reading this, or if anyone plans on talking to Dan soon (Tom?), would you pass along the word to him that Robin (very surprisingly) has quite a few questions and comments that she wants to pass along to him. I just haven't been able to type them out and pass them along to him because of this whole birthday/homework stuff going on this week. I didn't think I'd actually have much feedback, but I do. I'm worn out right now, so as soon as I'm finished with this comment I'm heading off to bed.

Now, just to be clear, in order create a magazine, I do need to create a separate account on the beta site, right? I didn't realize that for a little while. Ahh...the only part that bugs me right now is all the personal information, because I'm afraid that will all show up with the magazine, which is obviously not what I want.

I did that, Mr. Printcasting.  :)

Having done that, I still could see no way to tie that feed, once entered, to my Printcasting magazine, and I saw no indication that it was already tied in.

On the "feeds" page of the magazine setup process, I browse "all feeds."  There is still no way to select my feed, even after having followed your instructions above - which I followed before writing of my difficulty.

Ease of use: one vital feature that evidently needs work, and I mean that constructively.  :)

Thank you for taking the trouble to create such helpful, personalized illustrations.

Apollo, thank you for persisting with it.  We need people like you who won't just say "That's hard.  *Click*" and off they go.  I'll see if I can unearth the problem or shift it over to Dan and the crew and see what we can find.  I do think your content would make a great Printcast and I'll do what needs to be done to make it happen.  :)

It could be a section called "My feeds."  :)

If there is one already, and it works, I couldn't find it.

I persist with it because I love the idea, and it is a credit to the great efforts of your team to have earned the honor of test-piloting the Printcasting idea.

Robin, Tom here.  As much as you can, would you mind posting your questions here?  As we're doing the outreach, I think it's helpful for everyone to see the issues and solutions.  Don't worry about the information bcoming public.  It's just like on the blogs.  The only difference is we need your info so we can start sending you big fat checks one day.  ;)

Apollo, it's a great idea.  I'm also going to suggest we create a path specifically for people who want to use their content in a magazine so they don't have to hunt for that.  Let me send that off and get back to you.  When you're logged in at beta.printcasting.com and you click "Manage your content", does your blog show up?

I repeated the feed registration process, and now I see it among the available feeds.  :)

Very nice.

There are some bugs to work out with respect to paragraph and line breaking as it converts from my feed to the magazine format, but it's a great start.  :)

Check it out.

Oh-oh, the "Newly Created Printcasts" link to my mag doesn't work:

http://beta.printcasting.co...

I tried creating again, now the "preview" step never finishes.

One of these days it will be a wonderful offering.  I'll bear with you.  :)

Apollo, before we go any futher, can I get a "w00t w00t"?  Nice....  :)

As for your Printcast, looks like we might be having a database error.  I'm sending it up now.  Hang in there and again, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.

Is there a special button for linking to the centerfold?

Thanks.  :)

One of these days it will be a wonderful offering.  I'll bear with you. 

Apollo, did you get a confirmation email that your Printcast was created?

Yes, with a link.

The link doesn't work.

RF, I'm pretty sure THAT would violate the TOS.

OK, Apollo.  More in a bit.  :)

Hi again ApolloDawn,

Just to echo Printcasting (Tom), thanks for bearing with everything and trying everything out! We have mouse pads and t-shirts and you're getting one of each when they arrive. (That goes for the rest of your beta testers).

You said that the preview step never completed. Can you estimate how long you waited? And what did you do after you got tired of waiting? Did you go somewhere else on the site, or perhaps change something in the URL? If the preview step didn't complete we're trying to figure out how a Printcast was created, and how you received a confirmation e-mail.

Also, if you could forward the confirmation e-mail you received to printcasting@printcasting.com, that would be great.

Finally, are you connecting to the Internet from home or from work? If at home, do you have DSL, Cable Internet or dial-up?

Thanks again for giving everything a try. We're working around the clock to identify and fix issues. In the end the final product we launch with will be so much better because of your hard work.

- Dan & the Printcasting development team

The first time through, the preview step completed.  Then I entered the publish step, and that's when it generated the link to the new mag that doesn't work.

I repeated the publication creation process to see if it would create a working link, and that's when the preview step never finished.

I wated five minutes, after which I refreshed as the instructions suggested.  Still no finish.

I will forward the confirmation now.

Connection is home, cable.

Hey Robin! I'm here and you can contact me. Please feel free to post your feedback in this blog when you have time. If you prefer to send it by e-mail you can send it to printcasting@printcasting.com, and it will go to our entire team. Anyone is also free to e-mail me privately at dan@printcasting.com.

I'd also like to point out that we're being very public about Printcasting. You can follow progress about the project at http://www.printcasting.com... which is a social network in its own right that you can join and use to share information with other Printcasters. The site already has over 300 members, about 30% of whom are from other countries.

We also post updates on the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab blog every few weeks. Here's a link to a page of all of our previous posts: http://is.gd/ki6U

- Dan & the Printcasting.com

FYI, the link now works.  :)

http://beta.printcasting.co...

Very nice. 

Some formatting bugs:  Page 3; no paragraph breaks in transferring from my feed to the page.  Also the end of each of the two articles of mine gets cut off with no further continuation page.

Page 2; Herb oils article appears twice.

Great to hear! Something happened with the component that updates the PDF but it's been fixed.

We'll look into the paragraph issue. Can you send the URLs of the sites you registered so we can try them out on our alpha server?

Yes, I will.  :)

Thanks! Yep, the PDF is missing some paragraph tags (although the feed preview shows them), and the ordering of articles from your feed does seem a little random. I just filed a big old bug report about both and they will be looked into. Thanks for your attention to detail! We may just have to give you a Printasting pen and notebook for that ...

Hi folks,

We discovered a bug yesterday that causes the text of some feeds to -- how do I say this politely -- hiccup on the page :-) The last line of some feeds will repeat twice. The cause of the problem has been discovered and it will be fixed today.

We post updates on known issues, as well as new features we're rolling out, in an article on Printcasting.com. Here's a shortcut to it: http://is.gd/lVLs Bookmark that page and check it frequently for updates on where things are at. We'll try to update everyone about big new features to test here as well.

I saw that too, and I was confident that you would spot those upon investigating my examples.  You did.

Once again, I think this is a fine pioneering project with a future.

Apollo, we've just rolled out a fix for that.  We're working now on clearing out the old PDFs and regenerating new ones based on the new code.  We'll keep you posted. :)

-Tom

We are updating the old PDFs, but that caused another bug which (we think) is related to server memory. It's being debugged now. What can I say -- sometimes you just can't win. These are the kinds of things you only find in an open beta test so thank you for bearing with us.

Most of the site works, but you may find that the "Microsite" for your Printcast won't come up. Stay tuned. They will all be back soon!

Step by step, we're getting there.  :)

The lack of paragraph breaks in the text continuation boxes (e.g. page 3) still exists, as you undoubtedly noticed.  Articles still being truncated.

When these are ironed out, I can experiment my way to some more suggestions.

Spam code SXXYK. 

More bugs:

I added a feed to Poetry Corner, where I write poetry.

I reduced the number of articles in the Feeds settings to 6, so that it asks me to add 1 more feed to make the required 7.

Yet when I try to add the Poetry Corner, it says "You cannot add more articles since it exceeds the available article limit."

Looking into it, I see that for Poetry Corner, it only shows 1 article available, when there are several.

Feed link: http://people.bakersfield.c...

Actual blog:  http://people.bakersfield.c...

This bug might be connected to the fact that blog page only shows one article at a time, whereas my Violet End displays articles vertically in series.

After making those changes and going through the Preview and Publish process, it disappeared entirely.

See: http://beta.printcasting.co...

Recreating it from scratch worked OK.

It was making changes in Edit mode that the disappearance occurred.

http://beta.printcasting.co...

Looking better, by the way.  :)

However, as you will see by comparing the Printcast rendition of the poetry and the original, there are some formatting challenges to overcome.