Pandamian

Eli James, co-founder of Pandamian, talks about the service at...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:38:15 -0500

Eli James, co-founder of Pandamian, talks about the service at Books in Browsers 2011 “Ignite”.

Pandamian widget now available

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:32:00 -0500

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. Here’s a screenshot of how the widget will look.

We think this is a great way to share you book’s progress, other than through our social network integration feature. If you are NaNoWiMo-ing this month, this widget should help you keep your friends up-to-date on your progress and also help you track their’s. Word count and all. Keep on fighting NaNoWriMo warriors!

Public ebook downloads now available

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 05:29:58 -0400

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 bottom right corner, your readers are now able to select the ebook format that they prefer and download a copy of your book.

This new feature is something we are testing out for Pandamian. Instead of being just a publishing tool for writers, there seem to be more need for Pandamian to be a “staging” area for books. One where writers can host their work-in-progress, pass them along in various formats to their readers, get feedback and work on improving their books. Try this out and let us know what you think?

Sssh - Things You Might Not Have Noticed

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:51:00 -0400

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 under the customize tab)
We added book deletion and subdomain editing (if you want to change from xxx.pandamian.com to yyy.pandamian.com)
We’ve also added Pen Names, so you can display different names on a per-book basis.

So what are we doing now? Well, we’re pushing to complete a list of three features, after which we’ll redesign the whole front-facing site and make a big push for users.

The feedback we’ve gotten from our first 700 users has been invaluable, even as I’ll readily admit that we’re still not crystal clear on how one might use Pandamian (we have lots of hints, and an overarching vision, but there are several things we’re seeing that don’t match up). Our hope is that the next big push for users would give us the data we need. Perhaps I’ll talk a little about that in a bit.

For now - we’re back to whittling down that last 20% of features needed for complete (and polished!) ebook conversion. So back to programming it is!

Announcing Antispam and Mobi Conversion

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 06:07:53 -0400

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. Today, if you submit a comment on any Pandamian book, it hits our antispam system before being approved.

Here’s what a spam notification looks like on your front page:

To enable this, you’ll need to enter an Akismet API key to your book. Simply get one from Akismet.com, and copy and paste that code into your book’s Customize page. (Writers who don’t paste an API key still get rudimentary spam protection from Pandamian, but it’s not as comprehensive as using your own key.)

Also, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve pushed full-book .mobi conversions to all Pandamian accounts. As of today, basic conversion to all the major ebook formats are live and working. (We’ve got image uploading and metadata to complete, so watch this space for future updates).

Happy writing!

Twitter and Facebook Autopost Is Live

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 01:01:16 -0400

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 wish this to be so.

The linking interface is under your Customize tab:

And once you’re linked and running … that’s it! Everytime you publish a new chapter, Pandamian will automatically format and post a notice on both your Facebook and Twitter streams. And because we use OAuth, we never once store your password, meaning your data’s safe where it belongs.

Stay tuned for more updates - we’ve got three other features developed locally, and should see a push for them later this week.

Google Analytics, and a few bugfixes

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:52:00 -0400

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 Google Analytics panel.

For instance, I’ve created a new analytics project for MBA Mondays, and the code is as shown below:

Once you’ve saved, the analytics tracker will be automatically added to all pages in your Pandamian book. There will be a delay of a couple of hours, though, before your stats begin to show in GA.

In other news, we’ve fixed a number of bugs since the last blog post - the majority of them related to ebook generation. It’s not working completely just yet, but we’re whittling down the number of bugs that might’ve given you a 500 error page over the weekend. Expect a number of other smaller feature releases this week, as we work on finishing the last few bits of ebook conversion.

[Beta] eBook Conversions Are Live

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 11:50:00 -0400

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!

Social Sharing

Wed, 25 May 2011 02:15:00 -0400

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).

Minor Upgrades To The Text Editor

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:29:18 -0400

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.

Multiple Books per Author, now available.

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:22:00 -0400

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!

Update 6 April 2010

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 02:08:10 -0400

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.

Idea Vs. Team

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:38:00 -0400

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.

Hello, RSS!

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:51:20 -0400

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!)

UI work for Multiple Books per Author. Coming soon.

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 08:51:00 -0400

UI work for Multiple Books per Author. Coming soon.

Fullscreen Writing Mode Now Live

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:22:00 -0400

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 icon, the interface looks like this:

(Oh yes, we’re obsessed with giving writers the best publishing experience they can possible have.)

If you’re curious as to what else we’re up to, here are the top three features that we have on our todo (in descending level of importance):

eBook conversion
Multiple books per author
A crude site-wide directory

The Pandamian team’s struggling with eBook conversion right now, but expect small feature releases (like this one!) over the next few weeks.

Team Chemistry

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:16:00 -0500

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 for the rest of us because our efforts were invested based on a single person’s word, probably harder for Yipeng because he did not know Eli as well as I did (and he was putting in more work as the technical lead). So most of the heated arguments were between Eli and Yipeng regarding feature development priority. We used to have meetings every week where technical terms were being thrown around for a full two hours, which caused me to be frequently lost (it took me a couple of months to actually figure out that “CMS” meant Content Management System. I felt like Eduardo in The Social Network when he confessed to his girlfriend that he did not know how to change his relationship status on Facebook), just to settle on what features to implement first.

As Pandamian took shape and things began to fall into place, I guess everyone became more comfortable with each other. We learnt how each other worked and trust grew, something that is very important. People were left to carry out their own responsibilities, meetings grew less frequent (not sure if that is bad) but the development progressed pretty smoothly. I guess all those arguments set the stone for something stronger. It created the binding chemistry for the team. We now have an understanding regarding each other’s take on Pandamian and realize that this drives the development to be more wholesome. We argue not because we oppose each other, but because we sees a weakness and think that it can be better implemented. Yes, Eli is still OCD about design, Yipeng still works his magic silently, Ray Chuan adds more technical skills and I still dream of the big bucks. But we all work towards a common goal, creating something that will change the way writers write and, eventually, the way people read.

Web Address Bugfix

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:10:56 -0500

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 accounts were affected to tell them of the fix. Thankfully only a handful of users were affected, but even then I am very, very thankful to the user who pointed it out to us (and by accident, to boot!).

You guys make us awesome. No really, you do!

Post-Launch Pandamian

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 03:37:10 -0500

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.

By that metric, I suspect that we’ve taken far too long to launch. Our early users are rather happy with what we’ve built, and (surprising - to me, at least) most of them are understanding that we don’t yet have feature X or Y.

And I’m not complaining about that. Most of them have made it clear that they’re expecting a host of new features, and every other day or so we get tweets or emails asking us about feature X, or bug Y, or how to do Z.

(I also suspect that the writers who are currently moving their work to Pandamian are doing it because we’re working to add ebook conversion. And maybe that’s a good reason to have your book on Pandamian. But at the same time I’m embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t ready for the launch. )

What’s taken me most by surprise, however, are the number of requests for a directory of Pandamian books. We’d built Pandamian with the writer/publisher in mind, and so the idea of a browsing tool was a little … startling, to say the least.

I’m for building a Pandamian directory, but I also think we should delay implementing it immediately. After all, we’ve yet to complete:

Adding multiple books per author
Adding the ability to upload and use cover-art (which is really a nice way of saying: set up a method to handle static objects like images)
Theming
Feeds
Complete ebook conversion

And several of these features are non-trivial to implement. (Also: remember that a directory is itself a non-trivial thing to build, if we’re to do it right). And so I think we should put up a crude, stop-gap solution to this, and come back to fix it up properly in the future. Probably better to focus on one thing at a time.

Press Coverage

We’ve not publicized Pandamian as much as we could, and that’s exactly the way I like it. Right now the really tricky thing is to build something people would use (or really: that writers would love to use), and we only need about a hundred users to source feedback from.

Which, by the way, we have.

I think it’s important to take the time to get the software right, before scaling it up for people. Quantity is easy to scale; happiness is not. And so it’s a better idea to maximize the latter at this stage, before thinking about sheer numbers.

Why We’re Doing This

I think it’s worth revisiting why we’re building Pandamian, just to put the hectic programming of the past week in perspective. I recently wrote about Amanda Hocking, this amazing 26 year old writer who’s found success on the Amazon Kindle store. What people tend to forget is that she spent a hellish amount of time researching ebooks before publishing to Amazon, that she did all the book-covers herself, and she took a significant amount of time to study J.A. Konrath’s publishing blog.

I’m encouraged by her story, but I also realize that for the majority of writers, there remains a rather formidable technical learning-curve to publish to the web. (I spoke about this challenge at the Internet Archive late last year). We’ve seen our fair share of writers struggling with blog engines, and web design, and site templates, here in the web fiction community, and it’s never nice to have to stop writing to deal with tech.

My contention, however, is that it’s necessary to make publishing easy and available to everyone, and it is the fastest, most efficient way to force publishers to change.

If we can make it possible for writers to publish without ever worrying about the underlying technology, and we can make it such that they really, truly own the distribution of their own books; then - I think - we would have accomplished something meaningful.

User Enquiries

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:25:00 -0500

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 loads really fast and I’m trying to start an e-book for my poems.

What’s the difference between a page and a chapter? When I write a new page, it doesn’t appear in the e-book, but only chapters do.

Also, is there a way to make it 1.5pt space for the paragraphing? I find that the huge spaces make poems less readable because it is spread out over a considerably large amount of space.

Daphne

Eli’s answer (Do tell us if our answers are too technical because programmers may forget that the rest of us speak English. We’ll send you another version in simplified English :p):

Hi Daphne!

A page is used for extra information, like ‘about the author’ and ‘copyright information.’ Chapters are the ones that appear in the actual table of contents of an ebook.It is possible to have poems display correctly, but that requires some HTML editing. Click the html button on your writing interface. You’ll see a popup appear with the text you’ve entered and the HTML tags attached. You’ll need to use two kinds of tags: the tag (which is the paragraph tag) and the tag (which is the newline tag). I realize this is a hassle, but it’s currently the only way to format poetry on Pandamian.

Note that indicates the start of a paragraph, and indicates the end of a paragraph. So: This is a paragraph! would display as:

This is a paragraph!

Also note that is a standalone tag. Put it anywhere you want a break, e.g:
This is a break Hahaha!

Appears as:
This is a break
Hahaha!

So, for instance, this poem (on display at http://amathematiciansapology.pandamian.com/8/) is done by:

Here, on the level sand, 
Between the sea and land, 
What shall I build or write 
Against the fall of night?
Tell me of runes to grave 
That hold the bursting wave, 
Or bastions to design, 
For longer date than mine.

Would display as:

Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?

Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design,
For longer date than mine.

Hope that helps!
Yours,
Eli
Co-founder, Pandamian.

For more information on Pages do check out Eli’s earlier post here. Delivering user support service is so awesome, here’s why:

Ooh that’s awesome, thanks! :) I’ve told my friends about Pandamian and they’re excited about it!

Daphne

That just brought smiles to our faces. Thanks!