Some moves forward

It's been a long two weeks. I've been working a lot of extra hours which has cut severely into the time I have to plan and implement ideas. This also resulted in another missed week of blog updating. Sorry.

A few things have moved ahead. I've decided not to wait for the official web site to be up and running to begin advertising. I can accept story submissions and requests for more information from the business email adress, and I have a couple of places to advertise already. The main one I'll be using right now is a writer's site I've been a member of for several years, Writing.com. I know a lot of people there, and should be able to get some good stories for the first and subsequent issues. I can also advertise a bit on a low budget.

Adding to that decision, I've decided to set October as the tentative first issue date. This will give me a couple of months to get things together and get everything up and running before the first issue has to be out. Also, I can run a contest on the writer's site and possible advertise it on other sites. The contest will be for Halloween, and the winning entries will be packaged into a special supplemental edition that will be provided free to anyone who has a subscription for the first issue, or who buys it during October. Starting the whole thing off with an extra freebie is always nice.

I've downloaded a copy of Sea Monkey and did a little playing around with it. It looks suitable for my need. It's pretty easy to use, you can work through things much like writing a word processor document, it's easy to construct tables, and best of all, you can switch back and forth between WYSIWHG and HTML coding. So I'll be able to do everything I was able to before, but faster and easier, and then go in and tighten up the code and add meta information. I plan to learn CSS later, but right now this should work.

I did discover a potential problem, however. Aweber, the email acceptance firm I plan to use does allow attachments in emails sent through them, but only up to 1MB. I may outgrow that fairly quickly. This should be fine for the free newsletter I'll be offering, but I had to do some looking to find solutions for delivery of the actual ezine. I have three options and I'll probably use two out of three over time. First, if early editions are less 1 MB I can just attach them directly. The more I thought about that, however, the less I liked it. I have no way of knowing if every subscriber's email will allow largish attachments, and some people may not like them in any case. My second option is to send a download link in the email and let people download the issue at their leisure. The problem with that is how to keep people who shouldn't have access from having access. It didn't take too long for me to realize I was grossly over complicating everything. There's no way to end the problem of unpaid access, so I just decided to set the download link to have a long random character string in it to make it hard to just type it in at random, and leave it at that for now. The third option was a file storage system.

There's a lot of file storage sites online these days. I was using one called Webhard when I was doing some freelance work with a Korean newspaper. It was pretty easy to use, but I didn't think it would meet my needs. So I did some digging and found a site called Trueshare. This one lets you have as many users as you want, has large file storage space for what seems like a decent price, and lets you send out direct links with password protection to groups of users. Not only will it work for storing the actual magazines, it will be a good resource for writers and artists to upload their work for use in the magazine later. I consider this a jackpot, since it solved a problem I wasn't even thinking about.

So, a little bad, a lot of good, and things are going ever forward.