Q: How can I help?
Thank you for asking! See this page for ideas.
Q: How can I get notified when a new issue is out?
The best way is to subscribe to our mailing list - see the bottom of the main page for details. Alternatively you can trust that most Paged Out! Institute members will be posting notifications on their blogs / social media once a new issue is out.
Q: Can I contact you via chat somehow?
Yes, feel free to join Gynvael's Discord (Paged Out! channel section).
Q: How frequently are new issues published?
We aim for one per quarter, but that's subject to deviations based on the number of received articles and processing power of the institute.
Q: Why the 1 page per article limit?
[Gynvael] While reviewing/reading/writing articles for various technical IT magazines I realized that nowadays almost all of them are pretty long (like 10 pages in print, or 20 pages in "source" form). The length is usually the result of the selected topic, author's desire to explain everything in sufficient detail, and lengthy well formatted code listings with verbose comments. That's just how programming articles must be, right?
Well, not really. For example in late '80 one magazine page could house 2-3 programming articles. How was that possible? Usually there just wasn't a lot of text in the article - a paragraph or two of introduction, or a note on an especially tricky part in the presented code, followed by a long manually minimized (sic!) program listing. This required the reader to actually try to reverse-engineer the code in order to understand it - but readers are smart and it was actually pretty fun to do it too.
The selected topics were commonly also quite different - instead of "everything you need to know about XYZ", the articles were more about individual code snippets or short programs that did or showcased something useful, fun (games!), cleaver or otherwise entertaining.
This led me to the idea of somehow convincing folks (hi!) to try and write short articles on different kind of topics - and thus I settled for the 1 page limit.
Actually there is another benefit: it takes way less time to write a 1 page article than a longer one. It's also easier to review it. And it doesn't take too much time to read it top-to-bottom.
I would also like to believe that there is less pressure to write about Typical Big Topics - there is just no way to do a complete C++49 tutorial on a single page, so how about just showcase this one fun new thing?
Of course 1 page articles will never replace full sized ones, but then again, that's not really the goal here. The goal is to see if we can create informative 1 page articles that are fun to make, fun to read and don't require to allocate a lot of time on any front.
Q: Why does the author need to prepare the article layout?
In a typical magazine the author writes the content in a rich-text editor, and then the publisher handles laying out everything on the pages. In our case however we decided to try a different model - one where it's up to the author to propose the layout. There are two reasons for this.
One reason is that it allows authors to create non-standard "articles", like cheat sheets, diagrams or infographics, and also gives them full control over the layout.
The second reason is that we're operating with pretty limited resources (well, this is a free electronic magazine, from the community for the community) and offsetting the layouts to authors is one of the trade offs we had to make.
We do realize that this means that article layouts will not be consistent, though there are some ideas on how to minimize this for future issues (e.g. make a collection of templates for various editors authors may use, or just hire a DTP specialist to handle this). But before we proceed we would like to make sure there is actually any interest in the Paged Out! magazine. :)
Q: Can I publish the article on my blog / somewhere else later on?
Yes! Regardless of which of the proposed licenses you select, you keep all the copyright (we just get a non-exclusive license). Furthermore, we'll send you the final PDF of your article in Paged Out! layout if you would like to use that. See Step 3: Select a license for your article for more details on licenses you can use.
Note: If you plan to publish the article with another (e.g. commercial) publisher, please remember to let them know that you've already granted us the non-exclusive license (some publishers require exclusive licenses or copyright transfer, so this might be important).
Q: Can I repost/republish an old article in Paged Out!?
In general, yes. There are several things to note however. First of all, you'll have to bring the article to Paged Out!'s format (one page, etc). Secondly, if you've published the article with another publisher, be sure that you are still allowed to publish it with us (i.e. you didn't transfer the copyrights, nor give out an exclusive license). And thirdly, do include a footnote specifying where the article was originally published and when (to avoid self-plagiarism).
Q: What's your business model?
Paged Out! isn't a business venture and our goal is not to make a living out of it. The goal is to create an experimental not-for-profit magazine that we ourselves would like to read and give something back to the community.
All expenses for the initial issues are paid for by Gynvael out of his own pocket. That being said, eventually we would like to make the magazine self-sustaining and still keep it free for downloading, sharing and printing. We have a few ideas how to do that - some examples: crowdfunding profile (e.g. patreon), selling advertisement space in the magazine, or (eventually) selling nicely printed special editions (that's why we require commercial licenses for articles).
Q: How much are you paying for an article?
Zero. This is a "from community for community" project, so we'll all volunteers here (this includes authors).
That being said, as mentioned above, we do plan for the magazine to become self-sustaining at some point. This also means that it's possible that some net profit might appear on the horizon some day, and we would like to share most of the profit with the authors. Please refer to Paged Out! Standard Author's Agreement for details.
Q: How much do I have to pay to get my article published?
Zero. We do not charge for publishing articles. That being said, we like articles we select for publishing to meet a certain quality bar for obvious reasons. :)
Q: I didn't see any bar about privacy or accepting cookies! Why is that?
Oh, that's because we don't track you.
Q: But the law requi... wait, what?
We don't use any active or passive methods to track our users. There are no "user accounts" on this website, and we're fine with low-resolution statistics (like view/download count) for "project success" measurements.
Q: Your website sucks.
[Gynvael] Sorry, that's because I made it. I do plan to pass it to a real web designer soon.