blinkplan blog

While Joerg is on his way to show off our brilliant software in London, I’ve been working on some flatplans for clients. I’ve been using the new ’save’ as function a whole lot - what a stroke of genius. (I can say that myself, because I didn’t think of it.)

You can base your new flatplan on any previous one stored on Blinkplan, and you can choose between keeping just the page structure (eg, three ads followed by an editorial page etc etc) or you can keep all the previous content. The latter option is particularly cool for mags that have a lot of regular pages. You just edit the few that need to change.

Love it!

Just to let you all know, we will - well, I will - Joerg - be in London for the Magazine Publishing Expo on the 11th and 12th of February. Hope to meet some of you in person!

I hope you all had a good New Year!

We have a new feature for you. When you create a new flatplan, you can base the new one on any of your other flatplans - either only the layout, or the layout plus the content - which is essentially a “Save as…” feature.

So if all your issues are layed out in a very similar fashion, you’ll be able to get a good head start on your next issue, and all you need to do is fill in the content, and make adjustments here and there. Please use the Feedback site to let us know if this solves the “Save as…” problem.

Kerry is in the Maldives this week. So if you have any flatplan / pagination / map questions, and you have been dealing with Kerry directly, please send them to the hello@ address rather.

I have added four more page templates to Blinkplan. So I think we’re now at about 20 different templates. Hopefully this will cover most cases people will come across. If you look at them long enough they start messing with your eyes.

We have setup a feedback page for Blinkplan at http://feedback.blinkplan.com. Please head on over there and tell us about all your feature requests, or vote for feature requests that are already there. This will help us a lot trying to figure out what all you eager beavers want from Blinkplan that isn’t already there.

We’ve also added a feedback tab right into the application itself. We love simplicity.

Owing to the massive response we’ve had from users who publish newsletters and mini-mags, we’ve added a new pricing plan. Called ‘Tiny’, it costs just $15 per month. It allows 90 pages per flatplan in five active flatplans.

Go to www.blinkplan.com/pricing for more info.

After a few user requests, we added a “spanning” feature. It saves time if you’re flatplanning a long story, for example a fashion shoot. If you’re putting content on a page with a full-page template, and the following pages are empty (ie, they have question marks) full-page pages, an option will appear in your page menu. You can use this menu to choose whether you would like the following pages to be repeats of the first page – anywhere from two to ten repeats can be done.

Blinkplan went live just under two weeks ago, and the response has been very positive. We’ve upgraded our server capacity to cope with the number of sign-ups. It amazed us how quickly the news spread: within a few days of launch, magazine folks from the UK, the USA, Germany, South Africa and Russia had signed up. Quite a few big international consumer titles are using Blinkplan, as well as many custom and contract magazines.

The Blinkplan Blog is now launched. Not to a huge fanfare - more or less just to a click of the “Publish” button - but nevertheless - it’s launched.

Now what - you may ask - does this all mean? Well, it means that here Kerry and I will let you know about product updates, news, and tips & tricks. You are welcome to comment on any of our posts. We like meeting our customers.

And if you are wondering what Blinkplan is, then let me tell you: Blinkplan is the easiest way to create pagination - or flatplans - for magazines. Or in other words, flatplan software. It’s real cheap, it’s real easy to use, and we love it. Especially the PDFs it creates - that’s my favourite part.

Anyway. Be sure to subscribe to our feed to keep up to date.