Turn Your Blog Into a Newspaper with Zinepal
by Matt on Dec 6, 2009 in MY BEST POSTS, Promotion
Think of all the people in your neighborhood/town that are sitting in a doctor’s office reading magazines every day. Or sitting in the waiting room at the car repair shop. Or at the salon. Wouldn’t it be great if they were reading your blog instead of Ladies Home Journal or Sports Illustrated?
They can be reading your blog — without needing a laptop or smartphone — thanks to Zinepal.com, a service that takes any online content and turns it into a fairly customizable and printable publication. Before looking at how it works, let me show you what the final product looks like:
(click for larger version)
That’s page one of a print version of our West Richland Real Estate Blog. And here’s the download link for the full, three-page PDF (about 1mb): westrichlandblog.pdf.
It took about five minutes to make that — from login on zinepal.com to “save PDF.” It’s really simple, and if I wanted to spend a little more time in blog prep, I could’ve removed some of the extraneous things like “No related posts” and so forth. But even without the extra cleanup to make the blog perfectly print-ready, I think that’s still a pretty darn compelling piece of local information that people would read if they saw it in a waiting room somewhere.
How to Print Your Blog
It’s really simple. Follow along here:
1.) Create an account on zinepal.com. Be careful what login name you choose, because it will show up in small print at the top of your print zine. I should’ve chosen “Matt McGee” as my login name instead of “pleeker,” a common nickname I have. Zinepal is free to use, but there are also paid “pro” accounts that give you more control over how your zine looks and let you add advertising images, for example.
2.) Provide the URL or RSS feed of your blog. You can do this right from the home page, and after a few moments of collecting content, Zinepal will automatically put the most recent five stories in your zine, and then let you choose additional stories to include.
(click for larger version)
When you’re done choosing what to include, you click the gray “Customize & Create My Zine” button at the top (above what’s shown on the image).
3.) Customize Your Zine. You can create a custom welcome message (the gray box of text in the screenshot of our zine earlier in this post), which is a great place to put your blog’s URL and explain to people that they’re reading a print version of it. You can also customize the name/title of your print version, just in case you want it to be different from the actual blog name, and you can make some basic font/size choices. With a pro account, several more options are available, as shown below.
(click for larger version)
When you’re ready, you can preview or create the zine. I suggest, and Zinepal does, too, that you preview it first so that you can more easily make any needed changes.
You’re Done!
It really is that simple. You’ll end up with a PDF that can be printed, copied, and distributed around town to your heart’s content. Even web-ready, low-res photos look fine because they’re being printed in a small format.
My only issue with what Zinepal offers is that your PDF/zine will automatically contain a “Created by Zinepal” plug in small print at the bottom of each page. It would be nice if pro account holders could remove that, but the web site doesn’t list that as a feature. and as Frank (from Zinepal) explains in the comments below, pro account holders can remove that small print.
Still, it’s a small beef and small print or not, I think this kind of grassroots, local newspaper/magazine could be a big tool in promoting your hyperlocal blog.
Your turn: What are your thoughts on doing print versions of your local blog? Do you already do something like this? If not, would you consider it? How do/would you promote and distribute a print version of your blog?
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6 Responses to “Turn Your Blog Into a Newspaper with Zinepal”
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Hi Matt,
Thank you for a great article about zinepal.com! Two things that I want to mention:
1. You can turn off the page header that shows your user name. Just check the “hide default page header” option on the “Logo & Formatting” tab when customizing your zine.
2. The little “Created by zinepal.com” message is hidden for Pro Account holders! As soon as you upgrade to a Pro Account the message won’t be shown. I need to add that to the page that lists the Pro Account features.
Thanks again for a great post!
- Frank
Thanks for the extra info, Frank – much appreciated. I updated the post re: the small print at the bottom.
As for the username printing at the top — if I click that checkbox, doesn’t it also mean the name/title doesn’t show, too? Or maybe I did something wrong?
Hi Matt,
You’re right. If you hide the page header it will also hide the date and title displayed at the top of every page. It won’t hide the main title that is displayed on the first page.
I should also mention that you can change your user name. Just log in, go to “My Account” and then “Edit”. On that page you can enter a new user name.
Cheers,
- Frank
And “they” said print was dead! Thanks Matt.
You’re welcome, Adam.
[...] admin on December 27, 2009 Hyperlocalblogger has an entry on how to turn your blog into a printable newspaper. The company is called zinepal.com and it looks like it caters to blogs that focus on small [...]