Sorry, we had a break. All web-to-print development was stopped due to loss of direction in the team. Now we are back on track with renewed energy and clear goals. Web-to-print rocks!

User registration improved

Users registered by printers are expected to click on the link and enter their details themselves.

Printers can enter new user profiles and type in their details, including passwords. Despite that, new users were still required to click on the link to log in. It was an unnecessary step, now removed.

Transparent images

Transparent images were handled inconsistently by our web-to-print software resulting in loss of transparency in most cases. It has been fixed in the latest update. Some minor issues still remain:

• TIFF and GIF files may appear on the screen differently as thumbnails. There is a colour shift in the palette for indexed colour.
• TIFF files with ZIP compression are rejected. However, ZIP layer compression is OK.

There are many flavours of PNG, GIF and TIFF files when it comes to transparency handling. Check before using them in your image libraries and let us know if something does work as expected.

WMF files are not allowed

Sorry, not any more. There were too many security issues with them and they are not used that widely to be of a concern.

More changes to come

You will see more changes to our web-to-print user interface in the coming days. They will be deployed one by one and your feedback sought before moving further.

1. Changes to the page layout - cleaner, more space

2. Changes to uploaded files handling - cropping, rotating, resizing, deleting, etc.

3. More interactivity - scripting and asynchronous processing will be added here and there

We are glad to announce that the web-to-print pricing has changed with the addition of one more digit (zero) effective from 1 Apr 2008, which is pretty much now.

The new web-to-print pricing per order is as follows:

• Australia - $2.200
• EU - €1.300
• New Zealand - $2.500
• UK - £0.850
• USA - $1.700
• Other countries - US$1.700

The old prices can be found here.

We are all off to Bahamas due to the windfall of money after the price increase.

Signed:
ZetaPrints,
1 April 2008

We may need to take our web to print system down to make a major update in the next few hours.
Apologies to European customers. They may be affected most. Please, let us know if you planned any demonstrations or can’t tolerate any downtime today. Email admin@zetaprints.com.

Keep an eye on announcements to track the progress.

In this update

* major performance improvements
* change from all-pages-at-once to per-page preview updates
We will enable the new per-page previews for “web to print” templates with 3 or more pages to begin with. Then drop it down to 2 and then remove all-at-once completely.
Please, voice your opinion on the changes.

Known issues

Old “Saved orders” and “drafts” may not display correctly in the format. There are only several hundred of them. Some are too old and unlikely to be used. Any new orders will display correctly.

A large and important upgrade is coming up at approximately 17:00 - 19:00 GMT (London, UK) time on 28 Nov. A short disruption for up to 15 minutes is possible to upgrade and restart all machines in the cluster as they all have to be upgraded simultaneously.
We apologise for the disruption, but this update has important bug fixes and a new automated billing system.

Bug fixes

It was possible for customers to download output files without actually paying for them. We believe the number of orders being cheated this way is tiny, it is still unacceptable.
Multiple user interface improvements and fixes.

Billing rules formalised

ZetaPrints fundamental rule is “No order - no charge. The printer pays when they get business”.
This is a bit hard to determine if an order resulted in a “business” or not from our end, but after extensive consultations with customers we arrived at a clear formula what is billable , what’s not:
- any orders for password-protected templates are billable when the order is placed
- any orders for public templates are billable when any of the output files is downloaded
There is a new interface to see a list of billable orders for the current month and past 6 months.
Read more in a new post on Billing rules in the help section.

ZetaPrints has made an important addition to its web-to-print functionality - you can generate GIF, PNG and JPEG files alongside PDF. Read the rest of this entry »

Zetaprints has launched a new web-to-print help site located at http://www.zetaprints.com/help/.

The individual topics will be linked to from the main system over the coming days. The old help site will remain available in the meantime.

User contributed content

The new help site is built on a popular publishing platform called Wordpress. It is very easy to provide and manage content using only a web browser. It is open for anyone to write an help article or leave a comment or a suggestion to an existing article after a quick registration process.

You are very welcome to register and submit your tips and tricks on any relevant topic, not necessary Zetaprints system directly. Here are some ideas for you:

• CorelDRAW tips and tricks
• PDF issues and secrets
• Domain name registration
• Zetaprints shortcuts and exploits
• Marketing and business advice
• …

See you there!

Zetaprints services are running from a new datacenter now. The IP address has been changed, all data migrated and the old site shut down.

Downtime report

The downtime was just over 1 hour against expected 30 minutes due to slower than usual connection between the sites. No more downtime is planned, but the new cluster is smaller than at the old data center. You or your customers may experience delays with getting previews refreshed in the next 24 hours while the hardware is being shipped to the new site.

Possible issues

It is possible that some files got mixed up, went missing or were replaced with older versions. The chance is negligible, but cannot be discounted. Please, check all order files carefully until Monday and report any issues.

Thank you everyone for your patience!

We had an unexpected service outage today caused by a human error.

There was some misunderstanding between Zetaprints and our hosting company. As a result our computers were pulled off the racks, packed up and left for a courier company to pick up for shipping to the new data center. Another local outage disconnected the office from the Internet.

It took about an hour to figure out what happened. reverse the situation and plug everything back in.

I personally apologise for the downtime, which was pretty much caused by my confusing instructions to the hosting company.

Unfortunately, there will be another outage later today when we do switch the IP address to the new data center. It’s hard to predict how long the outage will last. The timing will depend on propagation of DNS information, which is beyond anyone’s control. There will be a notification screen to inform the users of the situation.
The worst case scenario can be several hours and will probably affect European and U.S. customers from around the East Coast.

Cheers,
Max

Thanx to all our customers who helped with translation. Any owner of a Printer account can now switch the default language. There are still clumsy phrases here and there, but we’ll be ironing them out in the coming weeks.

How to switch language

Russian interface

German interface

Would you like your web-to-print system to speak your language?
Your help is very welcome.

This blog is about to publish a series of articles from Asian designers on the state of graphic design and printing in their countries. I saw two draft articles from our Malaysian contributor and am eager to see the final versions here.

We live in an increasingly shrinking world where everything is just a few clicks away, but we miss out on a lot of information from non-English speaking countries. I’m excited to learn about the Asian design and printing industries and their specifics.

Why would you care? Probably there are two main reasons:
1. You may start noticing and using Asian resources for the benefit of your business.
2. You may want to know why some of your competitors and customers are already using them. (they would be your former customers then, probably)

Happy reading!