The MagPi - A new online Pi magazine looking for articles

[ashleigh.stone@doctors.org.uk]

Hey all

I am pleased to announce that we have launched The MagPi website and we are now looking for article writers/project plans/photos/letters to include in our first magazine.

If you have a project you would like to show off, have a piece of amazing code or fancy creating some tutorials, we would love to have your input.

Please visit http://magpi.moonfruit.com for details on how to contact us.

Look forward to seeing you all there

[stevepdp]

That's a lush design, but I have a couple of pointers to make.

The site is built using Flash, which will be a problem for users browsing from a RaspberryPi. Might I suggest getting a shared hosting account, your own domain name and rewriting the site using simple HTML and CSS? I would be happy to help if needed.

Second point to make is that you need to be careful with your use of the RaspberryPi name and graphics. Your site doesn't quite adhere to the trademark policy which can be found here.

It's quite simple to fix, simply include a footer saying something like "This magazine is not affiliated with The RaspberryPi Foundation" and "RaspberryPi is a trademark of the RaspberryPi Foundation", and wherever you have used the logo, have it link to the RaspberryPi Foundation.

Edit: I didn't realise it at the time, but it seems the site will fall back to something just as usable for visitors without Flash installed.

[meltwater]

stevepdp, thanks for the feedback!

Particularly good info on the fall-back site (will have to have a try with it and see what it is like), since the use of flash was one of my concerns too (it was something which we decided we would tackle when we had a RPi to try it out on).  Does the Issuu site work without flash (where the example template is kept), I know it also allows pdf downloads too (I plan to look into options for using RSS to get issues too, in time).

As for images…we are aware of this and will be making sure that we get permissions for anything we use (the template is a proof of concept so the images are placeholders more than anything).  We certainly plan to make sure we comply with copywrite when we publish anything official.  That is on our to do list…

I don't think we need to say we are not affiliated, since we describe it as a community magazine, but that can always be put in the back with the rest of the links/details etc.  Also, probably worth putting the usual disclaimers etc anyway if we end up with guides etc in it (not responsible for any damage or loss etc).

Keep the comments coming though, all feedback is useful and we are keen to get input from the community, we want it to be your magazine.  We welcome everyone to get involved!

[stevepdp]

meltwater said:


Does the Issuu site work without flash


It does. It's not quite as flashy as Flash, but it works.

Having played with board #7 briefly, I can tell you that you'll need to think carefully about heavy use of Javascript on pages.

Browsing to Twitter using Midori frequently maxed out the board, but falling back to the less resource heavy mobile version worked fine.

It was a beta board and beta environment though, so you have to bare that in mind. Things will no doubt improve by the time the RaspberryPi is ready for schools.

Also, consider how users browsing through low resolution displays might view the website. Some children or third world users for example may be relying on that RCA video jack.

[meltwater]

That is good to know.

We can adapt things when we are able to try them out I expect (I've not been involved with the internals of the site itself).  Good point about the composite display...will have a go with that at some point too.

[Chris.Rowland]

One thing I think would be useful for an early edition would be some guides on getting the Pi distributions going using an emulator shuch as qemu. I'm thinking particularly for people using Windows who've never used Linux before.

Some topics would be:


A step by step initialisation and configuration guide starting from nothing.
Introduction to running this, including increasing the screen resolution.
How to make the disk image bigger.
networking – also ways to run without networking.
Making the Keyboard work in the GUI of the Fedora release.
connecting to other drives.
Introduction to security
This will rapidly move into general Linux topics

This provides a way for people to get started before their Pi arrives, this will allow them to learn and contribute to the project earlier than they would otherwise do so.

[ashleigh.stone@doctors.org.uk]

Thank you Chris, thats very useful.  We have discussed some of the topics on your list to be included!

We are currently looking for people to help out with articles, a short how to guide or a more indepth peice, it is up to the writer! If you fancy giving any of those topics a go we would happily consider them for the MagPi.

Ash

[Chris.Rowland]

I've got a draft of the first couple of items:


A step by step initialisation and configuration guide starting from nothing.
Introduction to running this, including increasing the screen resolution.

I'll send something once it's a bit more finished in a few days.  After that making the disk image bigger and connecting to the internet.

BTW, are you planning to work with the other Pi magazine that people have been posting about?