Issue #12 April 2008 Skip to navigation menu  

In The Beginning...

It all began way back on March 15, 2007, when I (Ronnie) replied to a post on Ubuntu Forums from jenhson:

Having a community magazine might be a cool thing. To gather good how-to articles and peoples (sic) thoughts. Have some space for advertisements to sell and return to the community foundation. By the way, the magazine should be free to everyone and be an e-magazine. People could just download it and have fun reading it.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?
p=2299937#post2299937

But first, we needed a name for the magazine. Two weeks later, guitarmaniac gave us the name we needed:

For the name how about full circle? That was one of the proposed names for the official Ubuntu magazine which never got off the ground and I quite like it.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?
p=2369793#post2369793

I thought that Full Circle Magazine was an excellent name, and many other posts showed agreement.

Meanwhile, BuffaloX pitched in with an idea for a tagline:

I think Full Circle is a good name for the magazine, but maybe with a subtitle like "ubuntu community magazine"? Just to make it easier for newcomers to identify what it's all about.

Using BuffaloX's idea, our first tagline was "The Ubuntu Community Magazine". This was later changed to "The Independent Magazine for the Ubuntu Community" - as the first suggested incorrectly that we were an official magazine.

Thus, on March 29, 2007, the magazine (still completely unwritten) was named Full Circle Magazine. On this same day, my historic posting for writers for the magazine appeared in the Ubuntu Forums.

Help me make a free 'buntu emag
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=396003

It snowballed from there. People graciously volunteered their services for various tasks. I then knew how much the community wanted this magazine. The first volunteer was linuxgeekery (Rob Kerfia), our web administrator, who is still with Full Circle:

I'm definitely in. I really suck at writing, but I'll try to contribute something. I might be able to help with the technical side -- distribution, website, hosting, etc.
 

Rob's first contribution left much to the imagination:
 
 
 
 

Meanwhile, I was busy beavering away on coming up with a logo for the new baby. My first version was, well, colorful if nothing else.

At this point, we had to decide on the magazine's format: HTML or PDF. I favored PDF, since it would allow more elegant designs by using a nice GUI application (after all, in HTML, what you see isn't always what you get). Now the hunt was on for the perfect application. LaTeX or Scribus was pretty much what it all boiled down to. After many postings with users of both applications, I decided on Scribus as LaTeX has no real GUI to speak of.
 
 

My first Scribus cover wasn't very good, yet I pride myself in knowing it was better than Rob's.
 
 
 
 

My second mock-up cover was slightly better. Some of its design elements are still in Full Circle one year on:
 
 

The postings were piling up on the Ubuntu Forums, so much so that we thought they might be spam (entire pages were added to the thread each day). Luckily, the kind moderators gave us their blessing to keep going.

However, we knew we would need a home some day. So Rob Kerfia got on the case:
 

I did some research and I'm going with drupal.
 
 

I remembered that quote well, especially when we released Issue #0 to the masses. We’ll talk more about this later.

It was time to start creating templates for how the pages would look. For colors, I was thinking of the orange and brown which Ubuntu sported at the time:

As a tribute to Ubuntu Forums (for getting this whole thing off the ground), I used their colors to see how they looked. Viewers preferred them to the previous orange colors:
 

Next, what kind of font would suit the magazine? I found a font similar to the Ubuntu-logo font, and used it for the Full-Circle logo, the cover, and the magazine. In hindsight, this wasn't one of my better ideas.
 
 

Ubuntu Forums user mykalreborn gave a new idea for a logo:

I've spent a little time in Inkscape and came up with a different logo. It's a little dull, but I feel it fits better with the 'buntu theme.
 

 
 

But then ookooboontoo appeared on the scene with a logo:
 
 
 
 
 

Here's a logo I have been toying with, I am sure someone could make it better with original files etc
 

Stop the presses!

The masses and myself were impressed with this merge of all four flavors of Ubuntu in one logo: Edubuntu on the top right, Kubuntu on the left, Ubuntu on the bottom right, and the Xubuntu mouse in the middle. Perfect!

The next version had the Kubuntu section moved to the lower right. Between that and the Ubuntu-style text beside it, the logo was coming along in leaps and bounds.

Irony? April 1, 2007 (April Fools Day) was when I released the first beta of the magazine. I decided on beta versions because they sounded geeky and made me sound like a programmer -- which couldn't be further from the truth.

More irony? April 2, 2007 brought the first posting from another long-running team member, mrmonday (Robert Clipsham):

I wouldn't know what to write about. But if you give me some ideas, I can write for you.
 
 

On that day, we also cleared up a little tiff. It was actually more of a misunderstanding between myself and a member of the Ubuntu Marketing Team. To cut a long story short, the Marketing Team were offering their services to help distribute the soon-to-be-released magazine. I agreed to this, since I knew the Marketing Team would have far more visitors to their site than we would have. I then suggested that I create an Issue #0 which would tell the history of Ubuntu, and discuss the new features of the soon-to-be-released Feisty Fawn. The Marketing Team liked this idea, and we agreed it would be best to release #0 just before the release of Feisty itself.

 

The following day mykalreborn refined the logo and it was stunning!
 

Now, we still use this logo one-year later.
 
 
 

On April 4, I posted some screenshots of how the pages were coming along:
 
 

A posting then brought up a valid point: which license would the magazine be released under? Burgundavia, from the Marketing Team, suggested we use the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. There were no objections from anyone so it was adopted on April 6, 2007.
 
 

Now that we had a focus and target, it was full steam ahead. A deadline was looming and it was time to further refine the cover image:
 
 

I was thinking: well, Feisty Fawn will be a hot distro, and Feisty can mean hot, so why not put some fire in there....
 
 

Ookooboontoo brought me down to earth with a thump (no pun intended):
 
 
 
 

This second one looks like a spaceship from Dr. Who crashing to Earth as it burns up!
 
 

April 12, 2007 saw the final beta of what would be released as Issue #0.

After exactly one month, and over fifty pages of posts on Ubuntu Forums, Full Circle Magazine Issue #0 was released. The day was April 15, 2007.

A few days later, I remembered vividly Rob Kerfia's quote about Drupal: "I've done my research...." Why? Within days of Issue #0 being released, his Drupal site melted and died. He had to quickly toss up a portal frontend to take the strain off the average of five downloads every minute (that's over seven-thousand downloads per day). Even then, his server struggled to keep up. It also didn't help Rob (though it helped us) that we were featured on Digg. But to Rob's credit, the site was never down.

The moral of the story: when Rob says he's done his research, be afraid, be very afraid!
 
 

Behind The Scenes

When it came time to organize Full Circle Magazine for Issue #1, we saw nothing available that was free and open source for organizing such a publication. We wanted a web-based system that could accept articles, put them in a wiki, let proof-readers edit them, automatically email writers, and so on. But nothing like this exists -- even now.

Initially, all the articles came to me (the Editor). They got merely a quick proof reading from myself, Rob Kerfia, and a couple of others. That's why there were quite a few mistakes in the first few issues, and many people let us know about it. For a website, Rob created a quick Drupal site which didn't do so well. It looked nice, but it was dying on its feet with the strain of serving Issue #0 to the hungry masses.

Roughly one-month later, Issue #1 arrived. Again our poor Drupal site had to suffer the strain of dishing out issues willy-nilly. Our main concern was either that people were getting a slow download, or that sometimes the site wouldn't load quickly -- if at all. Something had to be done. In addition, readers were complaining about the rounded Ubuntu-style font being hard to read, the brown colors, and the too-many rounded boxes. I've no idea why people complained about rounded corners, but they did. A redesign was needed. By then, we were also getting contacted by various readers who wanted to translate Full Circle into their native tongue (a great complement).

As time went on, and the team became larger, we implemented a Web-based system called activeCollab to help organize things. Of course, no sooner had we implemented it than they announced that the project was closed. But activeCollab had its faults anyway. Its main defects for us were that it didn't allow online editing of files (which we desperately needed), and it was difficult to administer. Once again, we had to think of something else. I'm sure you can see a pattern emerging here.

Rob got to work creating a new Website. Well, more of a forum than a site, but it did well for several months. We now had an SMF forum installed -- but with a portal front-end for gaining easy access to the downloads. We also created an IRC channel. We knew we needed someone to keep an eye on all these things. Robert Clipsham (MrMonday) was chosen for this. This choice was easy, since he practically lived on the forum and on the various IRC channels. While he was doing that, I set to work on a redesign.

Issue #2 was released with a new, cleaner layout, which most people liked. However, many viewers still wanted a landscape layout rather than the current portrait layout. This would be a major redesign job for me. Moreover, with several translations of Issue #0 ongoing we had to do something about how articles were proof-read and passed to the translators. Rob Kerfia to the rescue! Rob installed PmWiki, which would let the proof-readers edit the articles to correct spelling mistakes and bad grammar. With this, Robert Clipsham, Rob Kerfia, and myself would have to paste each received article into the wiki and upload the necessary images -- not a nice job. But at least the translators would have easy access to the raw text -- or so we thought.

After Issue #3 was released, I began converting the layout to landscape. This is probably not a big task for experts, but I was not one: I had used only Adobe InDesign (in my Windows days). Now I was learning Scribus as I went along. After Issues #4 and #5 were released, we realized the flaw in our wiki plan: articles were indeed being proof-read and edited on the wiki. However, when I took an article and placed it in the Scribus layout, the article sometimes was too large for the allocated space. I then had to edit the article in Scribus to make it fit. This meant that the article in the released PDF did not match the article on the wiki. This also meant that the translators were using the wiki text which, even when translated, was too long. I then implemented a word count for each regular article. One page was roughly 350 words and could include one image. Articles such as How-To's were unlimited. Left-over space could be used to advertise sites, such as Ubuntu Forums.

The next problem was our SMF portal. The forum itself was rarely used, but we had a few-thousand members we didn't want to lose. Rob Kerfia installed WordPress, added Google Analytics, and successfully converted the database from SMF to WordPress so that we could keep existing logins and email addresses for our mailing list. For a forum, we applied to Ubuntu Forums for a 3rd Party forum and they graciously accepted.

By Issue #6 things had settled down. We now had a good system for proof-reading; the forum was now effectively handled by Ubuntu Forums; MrMonday was helping people in the IRC and on the forum; WordPress was quite happily serving up five issues per minute without dying; and I finally got up to speed with Scribus. We're even working on a "dream app" for our backend to replace PmWiki (for more, see
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/2007/12/27/
programmers-required-apply-within/.

Things have settled down over the past few months here at Full Circle. Long may it last.

It may look like our readership is dropping, but you have to take into account how long an issue has been online, whether readers are waiting for a translation to be released, and also, not every download goes through our download counter.

Download pattern: Aug '07 - March '08

Right: Graph showing spikes as each Issue is released. Number of daily visitors can sometimes jump from around 100 visitors to over 8,000!
 
 
 

Visitor Regions: Aug '07 - March '08

Right: Google map showing where most of our visitors are from (dark green).

276,464 visits came from 186 countries/territories
 
 
 

 

 

- Contents -

Editorial

News

Flavour of the Year:
Ubuntu-Kubuntu '07 - '08

How-To:
-Deb Files
-Server Series Pt 4
-Ubuntu Disk Usage
-NEW SERIES: GIMP Pt 1
-Backup with Partimage

Review: Wiki on a Stick

My Opinion: Wine

My Story: Full Circle-One Year On

Interview: Travis Watkins

Ubuntu Women

Ubuntu Youth

Letters

Q and A

My Desktop

Top 5: Disk Usage Analyzers

Magazine Index 07-08

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