Just a note, 7 articles were received by October 13th the submission deadline. They are in the hands of the editors (whom I am not one of), and as mentioned previously the issue will be published November 13th. I am currently without internet access, so can only keep up with email at most until most likely 26th October.
The articles are all proofed and edited. I'm in the process of putting together the epub/mobi formats, and the html web pages to be added to the existing site.
The following is reposted from my blog (which gets syndicated on Planet MUD-Dev):
The first issue is looking pretty good. It's almost ready for publication, but there's a slight hitch. We realised that we needed to get the article authors to formally license their articles so we can actually use them. The lack of any real licensing for articles in the original Imaginary Realities issues, has meant that the copyright situation is confused. We need to get this right from the start.
In the best case, all authors will respond and license their articles suitably, and the not too bad looking EPUB e-book will be published on time. As will the okay looking PDF, and the superbly retro-looking web site. In the worst case, we may either have a two or three days delay in publication, or that delay and a few less articles.
If you submitted an article and are reading this, please reply to my email. If you didn't get an email, please email me immediately, or check all the email addresses you've used to contact us.
Thanks!
12 Nov, 2013, roguewombat wrote in the 48th comment:
Votes: 0
Too late to ask all those contributors to agree to a simple Creative Commons license? The license is very clear and simple. Something like BY-NC-SA (or BY-NC-ND for those who don't want derivatives that share alike) should do well. Or just let 'em all pick a CC license but support alternatives, for example, a contributor wanting to allow derivative works, commercial or not, so long as there's attribution.
The license for the whole journal will be BY-NC-SA. Contributors have been emailed and 4/8 articles have been licensed to it already. If the remaining contributors get back to me tomorrow, the first issue may still be released on time.
The other editors and I have decided to delay the release for perhaps a week or two. The articles are looking great, and are all edited and proofread. As this is the first issue, we want to make sure it is done right.
Everything from web site, to ebooks, are pretty much ready for release. At this point, I am waiting for Drakkos to make the journal.imaginary-realities.com subdomain point to my hosting. I'm somewhat reticent to spend money on another custom domain name, and also reticent to use a subdomain of my disinterest.org domain name. But if I have to, I'll probably go with the latter.
Of course imaginary-realities.disinterest.org is already taken with the mirror of the old imaginary realities, which other things link to. So it'll probably be ir.disinterest.org or something.
I like how donky is doing it. Once the first issue is done he hopefully will document the production steps and then anyone can do it.
Here are the production steps:
Post everywhere soliciting articles.
Receive offers of 20 articles.
Deadline approaches, 8 articles received from a total of 7 authors.
Editors copy edit and proofread documents in Google Docs.
Write generation script to make ebooks from Google Docs exported HTML.
Generated ebooks declared ugly
Publication deadline approaches, discover some people have expectation to incorporate articles in old site, and other people have expectation for something less dated given editing work put in.
Delay publication several weeks.
New site designed, made to work with IE9 and Chrome and then fatigue sets in for a while.
Articles hand-converted from the stripped down Google Docs exported HTML and incorporated into new design.
E-books for EPUB and PDF generated from site directly using Calibre with CSS overrides.
Google analytics code put in each page.
Javascript-based reddit links put in each live web site page.
Hand-made reddit links put in static web pages used in zipped HTML download, EPUB and PDF.
Upload all versions.
Announce in various places, or those where you remember your password.
There's no real time savers here, should someone else do the same. All time is spent by the various people doing the hard work involved in the various steps.
*cough* The editing phase was heavier than it appears there. :) The lot was edited for content and fact-checked where relevant, beyond copy and proofing levels.
(By which I mean to say, if you're going to do an online magazine, don't go thinking those aren't things you need to do.)
*cough* The editing phase was heavier than it appears there. :) The lot was edited for content and fact-checked where relevant, beyond copy and proofing levels.
(By which I mean to say, if you're going to do an online magazine, don't go thinking those aren't things you need to do.)
Absolutely. That whole phase was something I had nothing to do with, and the extent to which I was involved was bunging all the articles in Google Docs without reading them and taking what came out the other end.
I like how donky is doing it. Once the first issue is done he hopefully will document the production steps and then anyone can do it.
Here's the web site source code repo. There's one master Python script that does everything from generating the web pages, to the ebooks. If I die in a horrible sheep attack incident, and my hosting goes down, someone can generate a version, host it, get drakkos to point the domain name at it, and continue on pretending nothing ever happened.
If anyone wants to help out with the code, let me know!
Any article submitted after the 13th of October will have to go in the second issue, which has an article submission deadline of January 13th.
4/20 potential articles received from 3 different authors, none of which are me.
EDIT: Corrected date.