Pandamian

• 2011-06-02

  [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 (adding genre, price, etc)
  • Images (cover images and embedded images require image uploads to be done, which we’re working on)
  • Full-book mobi conversions
  • Standards-compliant epub output (it’s not 100% valid at the moment) Fixed!

  We’ve got a bit more work to do, so I’ll shut up now and get back to proramming. Till then, enjoy your new ebooks!

• 2011-05-25

  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 appearing besides your paragraphs. These allow you to link to specific sentences and/or paragraphs in your book. For instance, click this link to see a favourite selection of mine from A Mathematician’s Apology.

  Click the ¶ tags to select and link to a specific paragraph. 

  

  Click a sentence in the selected paragraph to highlight. 

  

  Then when you’re done, share the link in the panel. You’ll notice that there’s a hash appended to the end of the URL - this tells Pandamian which paragraph to jump to, and which sentences to highlight. The links aren’t automatically used in the Tweet and Like buttons, though, due to a limitation in the way Twitter and Facebook implement their third party sharing buttons, but I’m planning to rewrite the Tweet button after we’ve finished ebook conversion, and then look deeper into a workaround for the Facebook Like button.

  

  That said, I’m pleased to say that the code for this feature is open sourced from the New York Times’s Emphasis project - all of my changes are available on Github, should you wish to use them in your own projects.

  Enjoy!

  (And now, I go back to grappling with ebook conversion).

• 2011-04-13

  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 book of mine on Pandamian two days ago, and noticed that it was rather dangerous (and annoying!) to hit the back button by accident, removing all the changes I had made in the process. Today’s editor upgrades will hopefully prevent that from happening to anyone else.

• 2011-04-09

  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 “Return to dashboard” button in the top right corner if you change your mind. 

  

  To navigate from a book back to your dashboard, click the little “Dashboard” button in the top left corner. This brings you back to the main page where you’ll be able to see all your books.

  That’s it! Hopefully, this will let you guys release the pent-up writing “steam” from the past few weeks!

• 2011-04-06

  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 and production, and so therefore we’ll have to look into making some changes re: feature releases.

• 2011-03-26

  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 lose heart, and if things don’t pick up, you toss it aside. 

  So what’s in an idea? Without execution, it’s nothing.

  That’s why Paul Graham doesn’t go for ideas. He goes for teams. And that’s how it should be. It’s not where you’re going that matters, it’s who you’re traveling with that’s important. Ideas change as you learn more about your product and the market it aims to serve. The team determines if you can move fast enough to adapt it. The slow ones die. It’s that harsh.

  So why is it half of the investors that I have met seems to be gunning only for ideas that can generate a huge amount of profit, even when any indication of that possibility is only on paper? And while they are drooling over that seven-digit number scrawled next to the heading “Forecasted Annual Revenue”, they ignore some solid teams out there who have ideas that form the basis of some really innovative, disruptive tech. It’s always “Tell me about your idea and what is the revenue model” first before “Who are you?”, which sometimes doesn’t even get brought up. I’m not trying to brag about Pandamian although I do think the tech team is awesome :) But I do see a trend here.

  I can understand that investors are business driven people. And an idea which promises on paper to be able to bring in the big bucks is appealing. But, in my opinion, the team itself should weigh in more when considering the feasibility of success. I’m not trying to put the blame all on them. Investors have a tough job identifying good investments. Sometimes it is just too hard to evaluate a team they hardly know and they fall back on evaluating the idea because they can trust their business judgement. But even a great idea can fail in execution. 

  Spend more time getting to know the team. Pick the ones that will last and no matter what the idea, they’ll work towards achieving success.

• 2011-03-24

  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!)