FeedJournal
THE NEWSPAPER YOU ALWAYS WANTED

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Frequently Asked Questions (and answers)

General Questions

What is a feed? What is RSS?
"A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

RSS is the most popular web feed format.

What do you mean by award-winning technology?
In 2006, FeedJournal was awarded First Prize and $10,000 in cash in "Made In Express Contest", a software development competition run by Microsoft.

Why would I want to read feeds on paper?
FeedJournal does not attempt to replace mobile devices or computers for accessing feeds. But it offers an alternative when you want to really digest some of your favorite feeds. FeedJournal is best suited for subscriptions to longer articles that require more attention from the reader. Reading and keeping your attention focused on longer articles while using a mobile device or computer is very difficult. Research has proven that reading on paper is 25% faster than reading on a screen. Reading on Paper vs. on Screen is a blog post where I discuss this question.

FeedJournal Reader Specific Questions
How do I know if a site offers a feed?
Most sites today offer feeds. You should be looking for an orange icon or the words RSS or feed, to find out the link you will need to subscribe to. FeedJournal supports all popular feed formats: RSS, RDF and Atom.

My favorite site does not offer an RSS feed.
While more and more web sites do offer feeds, there are still some laggards. Second best from contacting the site owners and convincing them to provide web feeds, is to use Dapper's free services.
How can I filter the best articles in a too active feed?
You can choose to reduce the number of articles showing up in FeedJournal wither by filtering the items automatically by popularity or by filtering the feeds yourself. Setting up a manual filter is very simple if you use Google Reader. Simply tag article you find interesting with a public tag, and subscribe to that tag's feed in FeedJournal. The blog post Using FeedJournal #2: Google Reader Integration describes the process in more detail.

What can I do about feeds that contain stripped articles with summaries only?
Certain web sites opt for publishing a shorter version of their content in the feeds, with a link to the article published on the web site. The good thing is that site owners are becoming more aware of the advantage of publishing full feeds, so there is definitely a trend away from this. But, especially among newspapers, article summaries are prevalent. There are a few known workarounds to get full article content from a summary feed. How do I add a web article to my next FeedJournal issue?
If you stumble upon an interesting web article, you can have it published in your next FeedJournal issue. This is one way to do it:

The blog post Using FeedJournal #3: How to Publish Anything describes in more details the steps involved.

How do I find interesting feeds to subscribe to?
There are 100 million bloggers and even more feeds available on the Internet. Several directory services are available that ranks and categorizes feeds. A good starting point is Technorati, the leading site for collecting and rating available feeds. Another good way of finding feeds is to browse your favorite blogs' blogroll, for recommendations.
Which feeds should I move from my traditional RSS reader to FeedJournal?
This is described in the blog post Using FeedJournal #1: Choosing Feeds to Import.

FeedJournal Publisher Specific Questions

How do I make FeedJournal available to my blog readers?
You have basically 3 options:
- Use the FeedJournal widget to add a thumbnail of your first page, linking to the full PDF file.
- Roll your own HTML code. The thumbnail image of the 1st page is located next to the PDF file. Simply change the extension from .pdf to .png and you'll be able to hotlink to the image.
- Issuu offers a very attractive interface for showcasing PDF files. You can see it in action on FeedJournal's Start page. When Issuu launches an API, FeedJournal will offer a tighter integration as part of the subscription package.

How do subscribers update the PDF?
- In the management interface you have the possibility to save the generation process as a web browser bookmark. By doing that you just need to click on the bookmark to update your PDF with the latest content. If you are using a blog writer application like Microsoft LiveWriter, you can add the link to the list of services to ping after publishing a new post.

What does FeedJournal Publisher offer that I can't get for free in Reader?
There are some important differences between the two versions:
- Publisher allows the newspaper to be branded with your logo, header text, custom fonts and copyright information.
- Publisher allows your site visitors to directly download the PDF from a thumbnail image link.
- Publisher offers you to divide the PDF articles into sections.
- In Reader, the user needs to create an account and configure his favorite feeds, while site visitors can download the ready-made PDF file directly.
- Publisher can extract the full content of articles if your feed happens to have only summaries.
- Using Publisher, the PDF is hosted on FeedJournal's servers (unless you choose to host it yourself).

Which payment options are supported?
PayPal is used for all money transactions. PayPal have a long history of dealing with secure money transactions, and support all major credit cards.

Which kind of support is offered?
E-mail support is freely available to all customers. Gold and silver level subscribers of the Publisher service are getting priority. There is also a FeedJournal Forum where you can ask questions and give feedback.

I have a question which is not listed here!
If you did not find the answer to your question here, you can ask in the forum or ask us directly.