HackThisZine v6 Released
A little bit of promotion for the new HackThisZine issue from your friends at The HackBloc collective :)
From hackbloc.org
The content of this issue is stale, much more stale then we would like it, and we are sorry. The decision to move forward and finish up an issue that was started in the beginning of spring last year was made because we had already invested a lot of work into writing the articles and designing the layout. We wanted to release it because its lack of completion was preventing us from getting more recent and relevant articles out. And we still think it is a good read. So download this issue, read it at your leisure, and enjoy. We could totally use help with getting future issues out and there are many ways to contribute; write a story, help proof read the submissions, create image banners for the articles, or move the the SF bay area and get involved with the actual designing and layout of the zine itself.
The issue of what tools HTZ staff use to create the zine was recently a heated thread on the HTZ mailing list. There was discussion about the principals vs practicality and quality of using proprietary vs open source tools for creation of the zine. The current position of the zine staff is that design of the zine will be done as a group using the suite of proprietary Adobe tools (this could change in the future as it has been an ongoing dialog over the past 2 years). To help facilitate collaboration and increase productivity, zine design and editing will be done as a group with predefined release dates, after submissions have been collected. Hopefully this will allow us to get issues out on a regularly basis.
The HTZ staff are looking forward to future releases of the zine jam packed with contributions from the community, as this is truly a community effort. So send all articles about hacking the gibson now to make sure it gets in the next issue!
Submit your articles to staff@hackbloc.org or hackthiszine@lists.hackbloc.org
Christ. 6.29 mb, pdf. This … ouch. It's just annoying me. You -do- realize that many 56kb downstream users will have trouble downloading this thing? You might want to think about 1) publishing in a different format than PDF or 2) Resizing/stripping down the zine for slow connection users.
Font usage, sorry, but, this is absolutely horrible. Let me link to a quick screenshot to show you what I mean: http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/6884/thehellsf3.jpg. I'm not really sure how the spacing between the lines is called, but you should enlarge it. The font itself is too big and it's just not easy to read on a screen.
Another small point; spell-checking. I've stumbled across the word "friegt". It's perfectly al right to have an error or two in there (as "our" HBH Newsletter does), but from the looks of it you guys didn't even bother spell-checking the final product for that "one more time". You should do that, really.
Other than that, the zine looks really good. A whopping 40 pages, some images to go along with it (maybe you overdid it here), still, it looks alright. I like the way you guys divided the articles and such, makes it easier to read. The content of the articles are great too, I'll read this bitch to the final letter, no doubt.
Aaanyway, good luck with scraping articles from HBH. I think you'll notice though, that it's pretty hard getting decent writers here. No offence HBH. Actually, yes offence.
alxciada wrote: The decision to move forward and finish up an issue that was started in the beginning of spring last year…
Good lord. The issue took a year to release? … Wow. Don't get me wrong, I'll be reading it as well, but 6 months - 1 year is a good while to wait between releases.
alxciada wrote: The HTZ staff are looking forward to future releases of the zine jam packed with contributions from the community, as this is truly a community effort. So send all articles about hacking the gibson now to make sure it gets in the next issue!
It's important to note here that, while I'm sure your Zine is a highly-motivated community project, OUR community has a Newsletter that is also supported by both staff writings and community contributions. In that respect, it makes more sense for our community to write for our Newsletter, and your community can write for your Zine. Then, we can link to each other, hold hands, and everyone's happy.
Edit: Now that I think about it, there are a handful of people here that prefer PDF-formatted text over our ASCII (and HTML in the next one, I'm sure) version(s), so maybe they will write for your Zine.