About a year ago my manager at the Herald & Times set me a challenge – how do you move street papers like the Big Issue into the digital age?

On one level it sounds like a trivial problem.  Dozens of solutions already exist to translate newspapers and magazines into digital editions.  We already use several such systems for our commercial newspapers and magazines – everything from digital facsimile systems like NewspaperDirect to bespoke print-to-digital workflows like the one we developed between Atex Prestige and our Drupal-based CMS for heraldscotland.com.

Any of those solutions would be a valid way to get street papers into a digital format.  But street papers present another, unique challenge… how do you preserve the physical transaction with the vendor on the street when everything is digital?

There are, of course, high-tech solutions to that conundrum – technologies like NFC, RFID and swiping cards with Square readers are all valid solutions.  But they’re also fragile, expensive and not particularly well suited to the street vendor environment. In the end I came up with a pretty simple solution.  Using cardboard cards printed with unique access codes, vendors could sell ‘digital’ editions of their magazines alongside the regular print editions.

Working with David Craik, the wonderful team from the International Network of Street Papers and some talented designers and developers from 999 Design we’re well on the way towards launching a pilot scheme.  The pilot will run with the UK’s Big Issue in the North and Streetwise in Chicago.

Today we’ve launched a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter to raise the money we need for a successful pilot launch. Please check out our video below and if you’d like to back the project (and get some fab rewards) please go here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1882811473/the-digital-street-paper

Press coverage:

• The Register - Big Issue sellers could soon be flogging QR Codes
• Journalism.co.uk - Digital edition street papers pilot due to launch in July
• The Drum - The Big Issue in the North to trial selling digital issues on the street
• Big Issue South Africa - Street papers make bold move towards digital
• 2D Code - Street Papers Go Digital With QR Codes
• CorpComms - Manchester Big Issue sellers go digital
• INSP blog - Street papers announce digital initiative (and need your help to make it happen!)

For the past couple of years I’ve had the dubious honour of being asked to produce the Christmas e-card for the Herald & Times Group.  It’s always a tricky brief – produce a seasonal e-card without dragging myself or others away from a busy schedule.

In previous years I’ve just pulled together a picture, some clip art and a Christmas-y tune in Flash to make something like this: http://www.heraldandtimeslabs.com/christmas2010/

…which is OK, but not very exciting.  So this year, I decided to try something different.

Over the space of a week I took around 3,500 still photos around our Glasgow office and Cambuslang print plant.   I then stitched these photos together using a free Mac app called Time Lapse Assembler to produce a pretty smooth 30 frames/sec timelapse video.  In turn, this was edited to match an appropriate Christmas tune in iMovie.  Here’s the result…

Two cameras were used on the shoot.  Most of the pics came from my Nikon D3100 using both an 18-55mm zoom and an 8mm fish eye for the really wide angle shots.  Interval timing was handled by a great little remote shutter release I got off eBay for about £15.  It does everything the official Nikon one does for about a tenth of the price.

My backup camera was a Ricoh CX1 which I used to capture a second angle while the D3100 was in use (like when the drivers were loading their trucks and while everyone gathered for the final “Merry Christmas” shot).

In total I reckon I spent approx four hours shooting the pics (elapsed time was more like 18 hours, but most of the time I could leave the camera and get on with other work) and then about another three hours assembling the footage and editing in iMovie.  So, for less than a day’s work — or about the same as I’d have spent creating another cheesy Santa animation — I reckon we got a much better result.

Producing this video has really given me the timelapse bug, so for Christmas I’m getting a custom-built robotic tripod head which will allow me to combine real tilts and pans with my timelapse photography.  Exciting stuff!

For the second year running, I had the pleasure of chairing the judging panel for the heraldscotland.com Digital Business Awards. The awards, now in their third year, are going from strength to strength with more entries and more award categories than ever before.

The awards ceremony, hosted by Catriona Shearer, was held on Thursday night at Oran Mor in Glasgow. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists listed here - especially the 999 Design team who scooped three awards and Screenmedia who took the top award for the second year running.

There’s also a wee write-up of the event here.

The Great Scottish Run took place on Sunday.  Two races – a 10K and a half-marathon – happened under this banner and as always the Herald & Times photographers where there to capture the action.

As in previous years, we ended up with thousands of photographs.  And, as in previous years, we made hundreds of those photos available to buy via our photo sales site.  But the problem we’re always left with is one of discovery: without having the names and email addresses of those pictured, how could we let people know their photo is available to buy?

So, this year we’re trying a new experiment.  As well as putting the pics up on our photo sales site we’re also uploading them all to Facebook.  Users are able to ‘tag’ themselves and their friends in our photos with prizes available to act as an incentive.  All the pics going up on Facebook have a unique reference number which allows them to be found quickly and easily on our photo sales site.

Adding this reference number was actually the trickiest part of the whole process – standard Photoshop actions, even combined with the new Photoshop Variables feature, don’t offer the flexibility needed for this.   Instead, the solution was to script a Photoshop extension in Javascript that would extract the reference number, overlay it on the image and resize the output to a Facebook-friendly res.  What… you can script Photoshop in Javascript?  Who knew?  Not me, until last week.

Anyway, it’s early days but it seems to be working quite well so far.  The technology part was a breeze and should be reusable in future with mimimal effort.

Unfortuantely the Evening Times Facebook page was only five days old at the time of the Great Scottish Run, so we were a bit short of friends to give this a big kickstart.  Hopefully we’ll be able to use this technique again in future to aid discoverability of our photo sales service.

If you took part in the run, go here to see  if you can find yourself or your friends!

Great news today from ABCe… year-on-year we’ve increased traffic to heraldscotland.com by over 60%.  That’s a massive boost, especially for a site that was already attracting over 550,000 unique users per month.  The new figure of 893,000 puts us second top of all UK regional newspapers in terms of growth.

I’m particularly pleased with the result since the single biggest change between the 2009 and 2010 audits was the introduction of our all-new site, based on the Polopoly publishing system.  I was involved in the spec, design and build of that new site – plus the mamoth task of importing nearly 1m archive articles.  A lot of effort was put into both the SEO of the site and the opportunities for social media through Facebook and Twitter.

It all appears to have been worth it though – traffic moved onto a steady positive incline throughout 2010 and had nearly doubled between the start and end of the year.

It will be interesting to see what 2011 brings, especially as much of the responsibility for the site moves to the s1 team.

Link: Big boost for heraldscotland website

If you do any programming on shared hosting environments – like MediaTemple, Go Daddy or whatever – you’ll be familiar with the problem of timezones.  While it’s easy to set the correct timezone on a server you have full control over, things get much trickier on a shared server.

However, if you’re working on PHP and MySQL there is a quick, neat fix you can apply to any scripts that rely on the system clock.

// The PHP fix…
date_default_timezone_set(‘Europe/London’);
// The MySQL fix…
mysql_query(“SET `time_zone` = ‘”.date(‘P’).”‘”);

This works because PHP understands the correct offset for named timezones (master list here) and can then pass the timezone offset (in the correct “+02:00” format) to MySQL via the ‘P’ date parameter.

So, in summary… once you’ve opened the mysql connection in your PHP script, just add these two lines:

date_default_timezone_set(‘Europe/London’);
mysql_query(“SET `time_zone` = ‘”.date(‘P’).”‘”);

And that’s about it.