Start of two waves?

The first wave is a wave of posts. I've arrived at the TOC conference, and gave my tutorial yesterday. I expect that the conference will give me ideas for several blog posts over the course of the conference. I've also got some stored up ideas that came from preparing the tutorial that should come out in a while...

I have hope that the second wave will be a wave of action. I was gratified to hear that Digitizing Your Backfile was the tutorial with the highest registration. I'm sure there's selection bias at a conference like this, but it said to me that perhaps people are getting ready to act on projects. I hope that the good tutorial attendance means people are ready to act, not just test the waters. The water is great, and it's time to swim!

I do have the sense that after a pause for a deep preparatory breath, online publishing is now heating up rapidly, and this time it's heading for action, not just interest. As people act, I'd like to be sure that they act carefully, and think about all the options (including ours, of course).

I sometimes worry that our no-development self-managed model is confusingly different to people who have been conditioned by years in which expensive custom builds were the only way to get stuff online without being bundled into someone else's aggregated product.

Comments

Yum! Tizra Eats Its Dogfood

We keep talking about how Agile PDF makes it easy for nontechnical users to do sophisticated online publishing. Well, tell a story like that long enough and people start to wonder why you're not doing it yourself. Besides, any product benefits when its designers and builders are also users. Software developers call it eating your own dogfood . So a few nontechnical members of the Tizra team dug in (with Joya, pictured above, as menu advisor). We did it just they way any publisher would, applying our company branding with the Agile PDF control panel and basic CSS skills, then uploading PDFs . The only difference is we're not actually publishers, so we used files freely available on the web, and of course, we're giving them away rather than selling them. Voila! The New Agile PDF Demo Site Take a look . Then drop us a note , and we'll show how you can do the same—and a lot more—with your content. All of us, except maybe Joya, found it quite the best dogfood we...

Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra! Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at Scribe did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates t...

Behind the Screens, Pt. 2--Customizing Site Design in Tizra Publisher

If you’ve seen some of the sites created with Tizra Publisher, you know how different they can look. But how does this happen? In this second in our series on the Tizra Publisher web based control panel ( first post here ), we’ll show how easy it is to completely re-skin and restructure an Tizra Publisher site in a matter of hours. First, a little slideshow of some recent results: As in the first post, we’ll use the eat.shop guides from Cabazon Books as our example. Founded by a graphic designer, Cabazon has a strong visual identity and has done a great job reinforcing it across its print and online properties. Step 1: Pick a design While Tizra Publisher does provide pre-made templates for publishers to customize, Cabazon already had a site design they were happy with, and wanted to carry it over to the new online books site they were building on Tizra Publisher. Screens from the preexisting design they wanted to match: Cabazon’s original eat.shop homepage. Origin...

Tizra Blog

Search This Blog