One day only*. Choose as many issues you like from here, and click on the "FREE Digital Download" button.
Happy Christmas. :)
p.s: If you're an existing subscriber (which already has accessed to all the issues), I have something for you too: one extra month will be added to your subscription period, regardless you're on digital/print plan.
*2 days to be exact to cover all the timezones.
Comments [2]
Well, I'm happy to say that the no.1 most requested feature for Hacker Monthly is here.
If you own a Kindle, you're in luck. Kindle Direct Delivery lets you directly receive the latest issue of Hacker Monthly on your Kindle. No more downloading, unzipping and transferring.
Comments [4]
Issue #13 is out. Here are a few thoughts about this latest issue:
Comments [0]
This post shows you how I make Hacker Monthly. I promised my friend Jacques Mattheij (jacquesm in HN) to share this a couple of months ago, but never been able to finish the piece. Well, it's here now.
-------
I start with a list of Hacker News' top submissions (>100 votes) for the past months, using @newsyc100 by @jeffmiller (thank you!). I go through each articles and choose it if fits for the magazine.
The filtering guidelines are pretty simple: no news (you don't want to read about iPad 2 release in Hacker Monthly), no blog rants, not from major publications (e.g WSJ, NYT) and not too lengthy (Hacker Monthly only has a 40+ page limits). Preferences are given to articles which are both educational and "intellectual-curiosity-challenging" (the Hacker News Mantra).
There is no limit on how many articles are chosen at this stage (as long as it fits the selection criterias). I really take my time in the articles selection and could use up to a week for this. Sometimes when I'm not sure whether the particular article is suitable for Hacker Monthly, I sleep through it and look at it the next day again.
From all of the chosen articles, I filtered the list to 15-20 articles for the upcoming issue (the rest are deferred to the issue after or special issue), with a healthy mixture of programming, startup, design and miscellanous (under "Special" section).
Asking for permission to publish from the original author is probably the toughest part. A lot of people just doesn't have a contact form/email address listed on their website. I have my own bag of tricks when it come to searching email address (worthy of a separate post), but when all methods fail, I will just leave a blog comment or message their Twitter account. After obtaining their email addresses, I email each of the authors personally to obtain their permission, biography and mailing address (if you didn't know already, every contributing author receives a print copy + 1 year digital subscription). This takes another week.
Next, I pass the article list to one of my proofreaders. Unbeknownst to many people, every single article which appeared in Hacker Monthly are proofread not once, but twice -- the first time by a professional proofreader and the final check by yours truly. Why? Because the majority part of the magazine are blog posts and they usually are littered with spelling and gramatical errors (like the one you're reading right now).
If the article requires graphic illustration, I will work with my illustrators. We start with bouncing off ideas with each other first, followed by plenty of sketches, before working towards the finished piece.
And finally, I design the magazine. I use Adobe InDesign for the job. This part is well covered here.
There are several tools I use to produce Digital Edition of Hacker Monthly. I use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to optimize it (so you could read high quality PDF with less than 10MB disk space), and Calibre to convert it into MOBI/EPUB format. I have an iPad and Kindle to test the different formats (great excuse to buy these gadgets in first place) before publishing it.
------
That's about it. I keep trying to improve the process every month, like having an additional proofreader (so it's proofread thrice), and using XML publishing workflow.
Lastly, I would like to take this chance to thank my subscribers and readers for supporting Hacker Monthly. I enjoy making it immensely.
Comments [2]
Here's something for your weekend:
Comments [0]
365 days ago, I conceived the idea of doing a print magazine of Hacker News. I quickly put up a website (with nothing but an email form) and submitted it to Hacker News asking for feedback. Then, I spent the next one and a half month to release the first issue (while learning print design and InDesign from scratch).
Comments [12]
Comments [7]
Compare to other email delivery services, SendGrid thrives with incredibly easy API integration with your app and its pricing. We use it to deliver our latest digital issue to our subscribers by integrating with our in-house subscription management system and loving it so far.
Comments [0]
Comments [13]