We are currently using issuu.com to host our university magazine. I wanted to write a bit about our experience, the pitfalls and my crude work around.

Challenge: Get our printed publication online as soon as it’s approved and at the printer.

We have specific obstacles at FIU since we do not have a dedicated central web team. In the past our magazine has been produced as an individual html website like this. Problem is, it takes a few weeks (or months sometimes) and requires a lengthly proof/approval process.

Solution: Enter issuu.com. I discovered it by accident while searching for PDF to flash options. It has a beautiful full screen viewer. You can even subscribe to an rss feed for receiving future issues. They features one of our issues on the home page and we received 1500 views in a few days.  Tip: make sure you pick your username as you will not be able to change it.

Technical issues: We use In-Design for our magazine and there were weird boxes appearing around certain graphic images in the magazine. You will not see the errors until it is converted and posted online, so you will need to review the publication carefully once its up.

Our low tech solution: We opened the pages from the PDF file with the problem in photoshop and recreated PDFs from photoshop for just pages that had the problem. We only had 2-3 per issue so this was not too difficult.

Conclusion: There may be many ways to do this but this is just so simple and fast that it trumps most any other I have seen. The logo and link to issuu.com is very small and the full screen viewer is very slick looking. We are still wrestling with whether we need to post the articles as web pages or maybe using blog software. The reason being, of course, that search engines will not necessary find an article and it is difficult to link to particular story. However, the search engine on issuu.com does a great job of searching the flash, even pulling up specific pages in the publication.

I will post a follow-up with our new site for hosting these flash viewers once we finalize it.

fiu, flash, issuu.com, magazine, pdf to flash, web 2.0 Hide