November 2011
2 posts
Pandamian widget now available
We have just pushed a small feature update on Pandamian that allows authors to embed a widget on their personal blog or website to show the progress of their Pandamian books.
If you head on over to the “Customize” tab of your book, you’ll notice a new category called “Widget”.
This is where you can get the widget HTML code to embed anywhere on your own website....
October 2011
1 post
Public ebook downloads now available
We have implemented user-facing downloads for authors who want to allow their readers to download an ebook version of their books for offline reading.
How is this done? Head on to the “Customize” tab of your book and you will notice two extra options at the top of the page:
Select the options that you require and this is what your readers will see on your book:
Notice at the...
August 2011
1 post
Sssh - Things You Might Not Have Noticed
We’ve pared back our blog posts over at Pandamian, and for good reason - it’s very tempting to shout about new things when it’s not completely ready. But here are some things we didn’t talk about in the past, but were pushed quietly into the product:
We have a completely updated, redesigned backend.
We have CSS editing so you can change how your book looks. (hint: look...
July 2011
2 posts
Announcing Antispam and Mobi Conversion
When we launched Pandamian, we knew that we’d have to build antispam protection into our comments sooner or later. This has increased in importance, especially over the past few weeks, as several writers on our platform have tweeted or emailed to complain of a growing spam problem. Well, I’m happy to report that Akismet antispam integration is live and working on all Pandamian books....
Twitter and Facebook Autopost Is Live
If you’ve ever had to log into your Twitter or Facebook accounts to announce new chapters for your Pandamian book, fret no more! Autoposting is now live on all Pandamian books.
Autoposting is easy: first, link your book to your Twitter or Facebook account. We’ve made the linking process granular, meaning that each book can link to a specific Facebook or Twitter account, should you...
June 2011
2 posts
Google Analytics, and a few bugfixes
Today, we’ve added the option to add Google Analytics tracking code to your Pandamian books. It’s under your Customize tab, scroll to the very bottom and you’ll see something like this:
To start tracking, add your Google Analytics Domain ID and save. Your Domain ID is the code that begins with UA, and looks like UA-123456-7. This shows up when you create a new project in your...
[Beta] eBook Conversions Are Live
I’m pleased to announce that beta ebook conversions are now live. (It’s beta because it’s not 100% complete, but it’s live so you can play with it while we’re finishing up the last bits!)
This is what book conversions look like:
And this is what chapter conversion looks like:
So what’s left to do? Well, we’re currently working on:
Metadata entry...
May 2011
1 post
Social Sharing
You’ve probably noticed heart-shape buttons all over your Pandamian books by now, but if you haven’t, I’m pleased to announce social sharing is now live (and completely functional!) across all Pandamian books.
The cool thing about this is that we’ve built some deep linking features into our social buttons: if you open the sharing panel, you’ll notice ¶ tags...
April 2011
3 posts
Minor Upgrades To The Text Editor
We’ve changed a couple of things with the Pandamian text editor. The editor:
Uses a different — hopefully more readable — font.
Prevents a writer from hitting the back button by accident, while in the middle of writing
And if — in the event that the writer hits the back button — clicking forward would restore both the page and the text he/she was working on.
I spent some time updating a...
Multiple Books per Author, now available.
Some of you might already have noticed this in your account, with a spanking new dashboard.
The green “Create A New Book” button in the right column allows you to add a new book to your profile.
From here, you can add in all the necessary information needed to create a new book (Similar to what you did when first using Pandamian). Start writing immediately after. Click the...
Update 6 April 2010
Just a quick update:
We’ve adapted the database schema for the create multiple books feature. It’s live, and stable, but we’ve not released it to accounts yet. There are still a few bugs that need to wiped clean before we can.
For those of you who’ve been waiting for two weeks now, we’re really sorry about this. There’s a bit of a disconnect between planning...
March 2011
7 posts
Idea Vs. Team
Have you ever stumbled upon an idea that you think is going to be the next billion-dollar business? It’s like the world just lit up and you get all excited. You start doing some market research, you talk to people about it and they get excited about the idea too. That is, until you hit a major flaw in the idea, and that almost always happens. Now the idea does not seem so feasible anymore. You...
Hello, RSS!
RSS feeds are now live on all Pandamian accounts. Ray Chuan has reported that the multiple books feature is ready on the backend, but we’ve yet to hook it up properly to the UI and test it to make sure things don’t break.
It should be ready by the end of the week, though. (I know I’ve said that before, but it should be true this time around!)
Fullscreen Writing Mode Now Live
We’ve just released a cool new feature, already available in all Pandamian accounts: fullscreen writing. You’ll now notice an ‘expand’ icon on the top right corner of both the Write Chapter and Write Page screens, which you can click to launch a no-distractions writing environment.
The normal writing interface looks like this:
And once you’ve clicked the expand...
Team Chemistry
Have you ever had that gut feeling that things will turn out well because of the people you are working with? Call me optimistic, but the reason I have a good feeling about Pandamian is not only because users are giving us encouraging feedback but also because of the team dynamics.
At the beginning of the development, direction was mainly based on Eli’s word. And that was hard to swallow...
Web Address Bugfix
We’ve just fixed a fairly significant bug today that involved web addresses and the ability to view your book. Long story short - several writers had entered capital letters for their Pandamian site URLs, and our software couldn’t figure out which book to display when the user visited his or her own front page.
Yipeng, one of our co-founders, has contacted all the users whose...
Post-Launch Pandamian
This post was originally posted to Novelr.com (Eli James’s blog on publishing and the web)
It’s been a week since we launched Pandamian, and I’ve got a few quick notes on how we’ve fared.
User Feedback
There’s this mantra in startup-land that applies to product launches: you know you’ve launched too late when you’re not embarrassed by your product.
...
February 2011
9 posts
1 tag
User Enquiries
To make our user service delivery better, we thought we should post some of the support requests and their answers on our blog so that users experiencing similar situations can find the solutions without waiting for us to end classes or complete our singing sessions in the showers :)
Here’s some questions from our user Daphne about Pages and paragraph formatting:
Hey guys! The website...
Product First, Startup .......... Much Later
Sorry readers, but do bear with me as I churn out another startup-philisophical post. This happens when all the tech guys are building the product and the biz guy is waiting it out, impatiently :)
Our recent launch has changed the way I view starting up. Previously it was:
Find idea > Develop prototype > Get some users to test > Get funding (Yay!) > Incorporate (I’ve Made It!)
...
On Launching
And … the Pandamian beta has launched! Ray Chuan’s not particularly happy with the way we’ve rolled out this release, and so we’re probably going to have to do a post mortem (plus perhaps work out how our deployment would work in the not-too-distant-future).
Personal thoughts on the launch?
1) I’m excited to see that we’re finally seeing real-world usage,...
Not Just An Idea, Not Yet A Startup
Yes, I know what your thoughts were when you saw that title. “Seriously?!?” My apologies, pre-launch jitters has gotten the cheesiness in me running. Ok, to the more serious stuff - today’s post.
I think the “entrepreneurship industry” is over-rated. Jollie O’Dell wrote a blogpost about the over-using of the word “Entrepreneur”. I won’t say...
A Note of Appreciation
I turned 23 a couple of weeks ago and my dad just sent over a really awesome birthday gift. He knows I have been working on Pandamian for over a year now, and am planning to explore the life of an entrepreneur when I graduate in 3 months. His gift was something he had saved up for me so that I could repay my student loan once I graduate. However, since I’ll probably be needing the money to...
Studentreprenuership - The Art of Balancing Time
Recess week begins tomorrow. This means no lectures, tutorials or labs and more time for Pandamian. These little breaks are really important for our development as the guys can all throw their sleeping time out of whack and code away (Shucks, writing this makes me feel all guilty. Marketing guy just sleeps as normal).Well, this is the life of a studentpreneur.
It is fun being a studentpreneur....
Pre-Launch: A Marketer's Thoughts
Pandamian is gearing up for our public beta launch that will happen, fingers crossed, next week. As the marketing guy of the team a couple of things are running through my head right now. Will anyone use Pandamian? Who will use it? Will they like it?
For the first question, honestly, I don’t really know. We have some writers from the webfiction community who have tested the private alpha...
Beta Launch Soon
Announcement: Pandamian will launch within the month. We’ve added a whole host of new features since my last update: a new reading interface, a polished-up backend, comments, and basic ebook conversion (still buggy, I might add). From early user feedback, we think we’ve got enough features now to go public, and we hope to begin seeing how people actually use our software.
November 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Pages Now Live on Pandamian
Eli here; popping by to say that Pandamian now has pages (I just pushed the changes to the software an hour or so ago).
Pages are for little bits of information you may want to attach to your book - your author bio, for instance, or copyright information.
(I’ll admit - I did the feature last night because I wanted to read an ebook in Pandamian’s website format. The ebook was...
1 tag
Blog Design Updated
As you can see. Couldn’t sleep - drank Joash’s Vietnamese coffee right after dinner. So decided to get down to finally redesigning Pandamian’s blog.
Time to take that down from my todo list. Now to see if I can stay on my bed, and away from the computer screen.
1 tag
Pandamian - A Publishing Support Layer
This is the full text of a speech Eli James gave at Books in Browsers, a technical meeting for people currently changing the future of books. The meeting was between the 21st and the 22nd of October, and was organized and held at the Internet Archive. This transcript was originally posted at Novelr.com.
Hi, my name is Eli and I’m here to talk to you about what we’re doing at Pandamian. More...
October 2010
3 posts
Software Update 11/Oct/2010
Delete chapter works 100% now. We’ve also fixed a few bugs regarding the display of the front page of a Pandamian book, reversed the chapters listing in the revise page, added auto-generation functionality for chapter urls, and fixed a couple of UI elements in the backend to better reflect user flow.
One thing that seems to be an issue right now is security - we’ll probably need to do...
1 tag
Software Update
You may now edit your Author Notes in the views page. Delete functionality is up, but changes don’t seem to migrate to the database. Yet. Also fixed frontpage link at the top of the front-end pages.
Immediate todo:
Link to and design this blog
Reverse ordering of posts in View panel
Add edit from frontend
Add success messages to all screens
Set up bug/issue tracking software
Adjust...
The Alpha, and What It Means
Pandamian is now in alpha. What that means, effectively, is that we’ve built 10% of what we set out to do. And that 10% is the foundation for all the features to come. We plan to rapidly iterate over this core base, adding bits as we go along, because there are a number of things we want to see incorporated into Pandamian and they’re going to take time.
What is this software for? you...
September 2010
1 post
1 tag
Hello World
Pandas can’t hibernate. They live on a diet of bamboo leaves, bamboo stems, and bamboo shoots (about 80 pounds per day, in fact). And they spend 16 hours a day eating.
More publishing news in a bit.