Turn your blog into an online magazine - a blogmag
I recently ran into Treesaver, “a new HTML5 platform for narrative experiences—with text and pictures and video. Treesaver divides content into pages, automatically adjusting to the size of any screen.” The promise seemed pretty appealing. You write clean HTML, and the framework dynamically lays it out in the browser, across multiple platforms such as desktops, Android and iOs. Take a look at their first few online zines. Very slick.
It seemed to provide a much more readable experience than a vertically flowing webpage. You can move around the article with the arrow keys. Past an article boundary the arrow keys will take you to the next (or previous) article. The great thing was that it didn’t break the web model — the URL for each article showed up in the location bar as I flipped around.
And its open-sourced on GitHub. And you can hook it up with Google Analytics.
So I pulled down all my Tumblr posts using their API, and threw together a quick script to re-render them as plain individual HTML files with the correct incantations to invoke the Treesaver javascript, which is turns out, is pretty lightweight.
The end-result is what I call a blogmag, this blog laid out as an online magazine. Flip around.