Work work work work work
Hi all,
Issue 7 had one difference that's probably (hopefully) invisible to most readers. Joe Fugate didn't put it all together. I did. Let me qualify that - Joe spent I don't know how many hours sitting at my side and gently showing me how to use the various features of the Adobe CS4 suite to slowly pull order from the chaos of a stack of articles.
It doesn't sound too hard, but until you've done it you have NO idea how much work is involved. Getting the list of articles, getting the articles in rough form (text and pics) then doing paste up of the individual articles using Adobe InDesign. I did some pasteup. Patty, Joe's wife, does the lion's share of paste up. Once each article is pasted up (paste up refers to older technology where articles were pasted on a sheet of white paper, which was photographed and the negative converted into printing plates - it's all electronic now, but the name lingers on for the process) it's sent out to the authors to verify accuracy and style. Sometimes there are 3 or 4 round trips before the authors are satisfied. Then, it goes off to a pro copy editor who looks it over for poor grammar, awkward wording, speling erroors, inappropriate punctuation, incorrect caption numbers. Those changes get incorporated and now the article is ready for insertion in the master magazine file.
A master, 140 to 150 page InDesign file can be hundreds of megabytes and takes up to a half minute to load or save on a fairly fast computer. InDesign isn't the most stable software out there - yes it has lots of good features that are really useful during pasteup and publishing, but on several occaisions I got sudden blue screens of death from it. Save the work often, and under different file names. When it starts showing signs of aberrant behaviour, save, shut everything down and reboot.
Repeat for each article as they arrive.
Then it's time to figure out where the ads (the necessary evils that pay for everything you guys get to read for free) will be placed. Sometimes this means slicing and dicing articles to make 'em fit.
Once everything fits, it's time to build the table of contents and the index and the sponsors logo pages. And check that everything that should have a hyper link has one and that they go to the correct location. To make things more difficult one can link on some text AND on the container holding the text. And the links don't have to be the same. So just clicking a verifying the link jumps to the correct location isn't good enough. Gotta make sure there aren't multiple hyper links attached too!
Oh boy, now it looks like a magazine. But wait! There's more...
Time to render all the video clips. In four formats: We're using Quick Time format for the embedded edition videos so that's a given, then a windows media video format that gets uploaded to blip.tv (the external video server MRH uses), then render two versions in .mpeg4 for the bonus downloads - a DVD res and a HD res version. Each render takes from 5 minutes to 3 hours depending on resolution and length of the video clip...
Once the standard versions are uploaded to blip.tv the standard edition needs to link to them.
Ditto for click n spins or other animation thingees.
Finally the standard edition is ready to post for internal review. Time to read it cover to cover. Again. And re-click every hyper link.
Oh wait. We don't receive the news section until just before publishing (otherwise it wouldn't be NEWS anymore?) So insert the latest version of the pasted up news pages in the 'standard' edition. Go through the links again. Oops. Almost certainly some news items will have missing links. Others will link to the wrong pages, especially from the Coming Events page. And some of the links will need to be changed to use the MRH redirect mechanism (when a Sponsoring advertiser is linked).
Back to reviewing the 'entire magazine' again.
But wait, there's more!
Now it's time to modify the indesign master file to make the printer friendly, embedded, and online editions. This involves a bunch of tedious grunt work with Adobe Acrobat Pro. If a mistake is discovered back in the standard edition, it's likely the entire process for creating the embedded, printer friendly, and online versions will have to be redone... Sigh.
Time to review the generated .pdfs for the other versions - and hope they're ok.
Now its time to create all the "Download Issue < whatever> " and reader feedback pages for each article generating all the thumb nail images for them. Each one of these pages is linked to the online version as well as to the MRH download wizard.
Speaking of the download wizard, more thumbnail creation for the wizard for this issue and generating the data structures to control the wizard....
Finally, when everything else is ready use FTP to upload the various magazine versions to the MRH magazine server primary and mirror sites. Oh yeah, and upload all the bonus content also. Some of the bonus content can be 200+ megabyte video files. Get the uploads started and go watch a movie (or even work on the layout?)
Finally, upload the online edition to Issuu and hope that it works right.
If everything is ok, then it's time to make the new issue the default issue for Home and Current issue on the website and add the previous issue to the Back Issues page on the website.
Now here's the incredible part. JOE DID THIS IN THREE EVENINGS AND SATURDAYS A WEEK. In addition to being a full time employee at a major software firm, a dad, a husband, and havng a church family. Until you've done it, you can have no idea how much work is involved to bring each issue of MRH into the light of day. Perhaps I'm lucky, I lost my full-time job 18 months ago leaving lots of time to devote to MRH. Anyway, Joe needs to be very careful in evaluating new features for the magazine to ensure they won't suck up more time than is available for each issue.
So if you happen to think of it, you might let Joe hear that you're thankful for all the work he's put into MRH over the past couple of years, just to make it happen, and then to keep it happening. Thomas Edison said "Genius is 10% inspiration and 90% persperation" - I don't know if that saying was original with him or not. But I do know that all to often if I send email to Joe at two in the morning I get a reply back promptly.
So lets hear it for Mr. Joe. He deserves it!
Hip, hip, Horray!
Charlie (I expect it's time to get off the soapbox now) Comstock - Editor for Issue 7