Jarkko Laine » Projects

Experiments in Publishing

Jarkko — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:39:26 +0000

In 1995, I was fourteen years old, and a magazine publisher.

Together with my brothers Lauri and Jetro, we published a monthly magazine Savannin uutisia (News from the Savanna), named after the fact that we lived in Senegal, in the middle of the savanna. The magazine cost 800 FCFA (about 1.5 US dollars in today’s exchange rates) and was sold to friends’ parents and other Finnish missionaries in Senegal.

At school, we had a PC with Windows 3.1 and an early version of Microsoft Works, so we could type the text and print it out on a matrix printer. After printing the text, we laid out the magazine using glue scissors. Page by page, we cut the text into suitable pieces (in the photo below, you’ll see how at times, we even cut the words one by one!) and glued them on sheets of paper. As illustration, we used clip art, photos cut from magazines and our own drawings. When we were done with the layout, we took our master copy to the copying machine at our parents’ work place and took a dozen or so copies of the magazine.

The content of the magazine was broad, everything from current events at school and in the small community of Finnish missionaries living in Senegal to jokes and fake ads for everyday products to a beginner programming course. One of our high moments was when we interviewed our teachers who had just had a baby. At that moment, I felt like a real reporter.

After five issues, we left Senegal, and the magazine with it.

This didn’t end my adventures in the world of publishing. I have written tutorials, blog posts and other types of articles on this blog as well as many other web sites.

But I never published another magazine. Until now.

Here comes the announcement:

I am re-launching Insanely Interested as a publisher of very targeted magazines for the insanely interested. I am already working hard on the first magazine, Bread, with the first edition targeted for a February 2012 launch. At Insanely Interested, I also publish a new, email only blog, Creative&Curious.

If you are interested to see where my experiments in publishing are taking me next, visit Insanely Interested right now. I’d love to take you on this journey with me!

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Will you regret not doing it?

Jarkko — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 23:40:27 +0000

Like this time every year, many of us are looking back to the work we did in 2011, asking the big questions once again: How did this year go? Did I spend my time on the things that matter, or was I just going with the flow, keeping up with my routines?

Throughout history, smart people have shared their tools for approaching the question. One of my favorites is this one from Derek Sivers. Quoting from his book, Anything You Want:

When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.

Or said in another way:

Complete the sentence: “In a perfect world…” Then get to work creating that perfect world.

This is great advice.

But there is another idea that has been growing in my mind these past days, which I’d like to share with you. Here’s how it goes:

Looking at every possible path (you think) you can take, ask yourself: “If I decide to skip this opportunity, will I regret it when I’m too old to give it a try?”

Most item on that list of good ideas won’t create any emotional reaction. Maybe you’ll think that it would be a shame to not implement them, but that’s your analytical brain speaking.

And then there’s the one that makes you feel your heart beat. The one that scares you.

It’s the one that always returns, no matter how many times you bury it. And already now, you regret that you haven’t jumped in with both feet and explored it properly. If you regret it now, how much more will you regret when it’s too late?

That’s the path you will have to take. Stay on it until there is no question of whether it will get you anywhere or not. Work hard so you know you gave it your best.

This way, in the end, even if things don’t work out, there will be no need for regret.

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Donation Can 1.4

Jarkko — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:05:38 +0000

I’m happy to announce the release the most important update to Donation Can to date: Donation Can 1.4 is now live with the following changes:

Currencies: Donation Can now supports all currencies supported by PayPal. All you need to do is to update the currency in plugin settings and all of your new goals will use that currency. You cannot change the currency of existing goals (this would mess up the progress calculations) so any existing goals will still be in USD.
Offline donations: You can now manually input donations received outside the plugin and they will show up in the donation goal’s progress bar.
Improved PayPal donation notification (IPN) handling: With this complete rewrite of the payment notification handling code all the issues we’ve had where donations were not saved correctly should be history.
Sandbox mode: Testing the plugin just got easier with the Sandbox mode option. Just tick one checkbox in the plugin settings and the donations use PayPal’s sandbox mode. Donations made in sandbox mode are not shown when sandbox mode is turned off.

Check out the plugin page to download the new version.

Update (just 15 minutes after the release… Ouch): There was a small bug in the 1.4 release that caused the donation progress bars to show up empty. I fixed it right away, so make sure to get version 1.4.1 instead of 1.4 and you’re all set to go!