We are still adding final touches to our new open source e-cards plugin, but here it is nonetheless.
It can be embedded into any web page just as I embedded it here. Embedding string:
Variable parameters
Width: set to width in pixels or % (in 2 places)
Height: set to height in pixels or % (in 2 places)
Data source: this is an address of RSS feed for the catalog you want to show. The catalog needs to be public.
What for?
Don’t ask. It’s one of those pet projects. Maybe there is some use for it.
The most obvious is to promote your products. Build a catalog with a few simple templates that work well in small size and are fun. Embed the plugin on your site. Ask others to embed it. The user may want to click through to your site and actually order something after playing with these small designs.
Your suggestions on what features to add are welcome.
Reports on your web-to-print orders already contain most of the information stored in the database, except the texts entered by users into web-to-print templates. It may be difficult to reconcile orders if they are placed by one person for the whole office. From now on, reports contain top 5 fields from every order added to the right of PayPal transaction columns. You may need to re-shuffle and merge some columns to add some sanity to the data if field names do not match across templates.
Did you see a cool design somewhere and now want to make a template with something like that? It may be too hard. It may be impossible. Let us give it a try for you and then post a short tutorial on how to get it done.
Did you have troubles with ZetaPrints interface and think it should be better explained? Tell us where you stumbled and we’ll post an article to help you through.
Sourcing designs
We’ve got thousands and thousands of designs submitted by freelance designers. Some of the good, some not. Soon you will be able to browse them and add the ones you like to your catalogs. The main problem here is the pre-press quality of the designs as most designers concentrate on the visual aspect and totally ignore the technical side of making the final product.
We need help with writing detailed product guides and pre-press techniques that explain what the final output should be like, all the pre-press stuff, what information it should contain (fields), etc. Then let the designers try and pitch their designs to you.
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.
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:
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 »
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:
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.
