New harpcolumn.com features

[HBrock25]

Hello all.

I wanted to let everyone know about a couple of handy new harpcolumn.com features we’ve just added for our Harp Column magazine subscribers.

* You can now link your harpcolumn.com account to your Harp Column magazine subscription: see http://www.harpcolumn.com/hc-subscribers/one-cust-id . Doing this will let you see your current subscription status, renew your subscription, or change your address right from the website.

* Once you’ve linked your account to your subscription, you can download a PDF of the current issue, if you have a current subscription. Handy for reading on laptops, ipads, and so on!

* If you are an overseas subscriber, we will soon be offering an online-only subscription via this same mechanism. No more huge postage charges!

I hope you’ll all try out the download and let me know if it works for you. Thanks for using harpcolumn.com!

Thanks,

–Hugh Brock

publisher, webmaster

[tony-morosco]

That is SO COOL.

I am going to try to download as soon as I get home tonight. Seriously, I love this idea. I read virtually all my magazines on the iPad. Being able to have the Harp Column on iPad as well is a great idea.

It’s like an early Christmas gift. Thanks.

[Jerusha Amado]

Hugh,

Is there any way that you can put the search engine back into the site?

[adam-b-harris]

Excellent, I would dearly love to subscribe to this, but living in Australia makes it a bit not so much worth it. Thank you for your efforts.

[tony-morosco]

I downloaded the PDF copy and it worked like a charm. Very nice.

If I have one negative it is that the file size is a bit small. I can understand the desire to keep it as small as possible to make downloading faster and easier, but in order to read it I had to zoom it a bit and it did result in a slight decrease in the image quality by the time I had it enlarged enough to read easily.

Not enough to really detract, but enough to notice. Making the original image just a bit bigger would probably solve that and not have too much of an impact on the download speed.

But it is a minor issue. Overally it is excellent and I am very happy with this new addition.

[Jessica A]

I’d like to see a list of publications by harpists on the forum.

[unknown-user]

Worked wonderfully! Couldn’t help but notice that the ad on the second to last page is different on the pdf when compared with my physical copy. Didn’t bother to check with other ads – what’s up with that? More advertising space?

~Sam

[cc-chiu]

An online-only subscription sounds great! Though I agree that the resolution of the file should be pretty high, otherwise it won’t read comfortably…

Will it also be possible to order digital older issues?

[HBrock25]

Interesting to hear about the file size. We can certainly bump up the quality some unless the hordes of folks downloading the issue eat up all our bandwidthh (which is a problem we’d love to have, in the end).

I’ll be working this weekend on putting together an online-only subscription offering and making it available to folks; I’ll post here when we have it working.

Not sure what happened with the ad unless we accidentally made a pdf of a not-quite-finished version of the issue… hmm…

[Jerusha Amado]

Well, I guess the things that I was hoping you’d add to the site aren’t going to happen!

[unknown-user]

Jerusha,

These are not the only changes to come, so don’t fret yet!

~Sam

[HBrock25]

Yeah, I’m very sorry about the search thing — the search capability on the site was just killing its performance, so I had to turn it off. We’re working on a total revamp which will have real search capability and lots of other good stuff.

[Jerusha Amado]

That’s great news, Hugh!

[HBrock25]

OK, I have now set things up so it is possible to order an online-only subscription and pay no postage charges. If you are outside the U.S. and you would like to subscribe, but haven’t wanted to pay an extra $60 a year for postage, this is for you! If you do subscribe and would like to switch over to online-only when your subscription is up for renewal, just email us and let us know and we’ll do it for you.

To order, see http://www.harpcolumn.com/hc-subscribers/subscribe

And yes, when we do the next PDF for the January issue, we’ll make sure the resolution is a bit higher.

Re digital back issues: I’m working on making them available for free online to all subscribers (the ones we have PDFs for, anyway). Watch this space for more details!

–Hugh

[HBrock25]

Tony, is the PDF resolution any better with the current issue? We bumped it up a bit. I’m afraid to make it too big or it will absorb all our bandwidth :).

Thanks,

–Hugh

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