Your major complaint was about the text title showing up on top of your custom header image. We just launched custom headers a week ago, and we noticed the same thing. We plan to add a “No title” option in the header creation tool to address this.

Hyperlinks are something we’re still thinking about, and could use your help to find the best solution. Right now we remove them because the PDF output is optimized for printing, and blue underlined text makes absolutely no sense in a printout. But you have a good point about how we should not remove them from the microsites so we’ll add that to our improvement list. We also plan to display images there, and add a link near the top to the original blog entry.

I would be interested to hear ideas from you and others about how we might include hyperlinks in PDFs in a way that makes sense in printed form. One approach: we could add a box near the end of each edition with every URL (perhaps as a tinyurl for ease of use) and a citation number, then repeat those citation numbers in the text of the stories. Those numbers could be hyperlinked so that they click directly to the links for those people who read the PDFs on a computer.

Regarding your stories getting cut off: this is a tricky issue because of the magazine-style layouts we’re currently using. We continue to talk about this and, at minimum, we will try to add at least one more jump page for longer stories. Also, by this summer we plan to let you determine how many pages you want your Printcast to be, and we will add or remove jumps to fit. Displaying jumps as more of a “book form” in two columns could also help here.

We think the online “magazine view” content will be more readable when we increase the font sizes, which is already in the works. However, we’re limited in what else we can do there because we’re using a free add-on called Page-flip. There may be other commercial readers available that would be better, but we’re prohibited from using them due to the free open-source requirements of our Knight Foundation grant.

Finally, regarding ads, we will be adding quite a bit more control in the near future. You can expect to be notified when advertisers purchase ads in your publication, and you will have the option to accept or decline them (if you decline obviously you will also be declining that revenue, but that comes with the territory).

Good point on the terms of use. The “California only” provision was an artifact from our pilot initial launch in Bakersfield. We have since decided to pursue a national rollout sooner than originally planned so we will be removing that provision shortly. Anyone anywhere is encouraged to use Printcasting, and in the future you can expect to see pages that bubble up content based on cities and towns that have a lot of Printcasts and content.

I will be posting something about how advertising revenue will be shared on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab very soon, and will post a link here when I do. It should address a lot of your questions about advertising and money.

There are a lot of other improvements in store for the future — far too many to post here — but I wanted to directly address your feedback. If you have questions about what else is in our roadmap I’m happy to talk about them. I will be posting some of them on the PBS site as well.

Thanks again for all the great feedback, and for trying Printcasting.com.
- Dan Pacheco, Founder of Printcasting.com

Wanted to try this out, but the video link results in this message “Sorry. This video is temporarily unavailable.”

Sounds like a really interesting application. I wanted to try the “print your blog” application that came out a while back, but it only works with a couple of blog platforms (I’m on WordPress) and only if the blog service hosts your blog. I host my own so that was out too.

Will try this on my own since you say “intuitive.” I’m just technical enough to get into trouble…

Have a great Sunday!

Gail