Announcing the first issue of Asterisk

We're working on it! The logistics of setting up print subscriptions in a way that syncs with our printer turned out to be pretty complicated and we didn't want to delay the launch further, but the store should be live in a couple of days. 

Yesterday I listened to Kelsey Piper's review using the Google Assistant text-to-speech (which only works for web pages), and it worked pretty well. Only a couple words are mispronounced ("aye" for AI).

It is possible to create a highlight for the same selected text twice, after which it’s possible to delete one of the highlights, but not the second.

The link click area for the left-side table of contents / scroll progress thing extends far enough to interfere with the click area for the “create highlight” asterisk button: https://share.obormot.net/screenshots/Arcturus_Screen%20Shot%202022-11-22%20at%204.31.35%20PM.png

It is possible to highlight whitespace, and then difficult to realize what happened, or to remove the highlight: https://share.obormot.net/screenshots/Arcturus_Screen%20Shot%202022-11-22%20at%204.30.03%20PM.png

Having created multiple highlights on the same line, it is not possible to select which one is deleted when the “x” button is clicked: https://share.obormot.net/screenshots/Arcturus_Screen%20Shot%202022-11-22%20at%204.28.48%20PM.png

It is possible to create multiple highlights in the same paragraph, in which case they overlap in the floating highlights section: https://share.obormot.net/screenshots/Arcturus_Screen%20Shot%202022-11-22%20at%204.26.46%20PM.png

When scrolled up all the way on an article page, the highlights are not visible. (This is not, or not just, because the “hamburger” menu button blocks them; scroll down just enough to hide the menu button, and the highlights are still not visible: https://share.obormot.net/screenshots/Arcturus_Screen%20Shot%202022-11-22%20at%204.26.19%20PM.png )

The page is slightly too wide for the viewport, causing a horizontal scroll bar to appear: https://share.obormot.net/screenshots/Arcturus_Screen%20Shot%202022-11-22%20at%204.20.28%20PM.png

I have a PDF of the print version I'm happy to send to you – if there's a lot of demand, I'll put it up on the website. 

Here is a PDF version of the monkeypox article:

https://share.obormot.net/temp/asteriskmag-modeling-the-end-of-monkeypox.pdf

You can generate such a PDF from any article on the site, in the following way:

1. Using browser dev tools, add a style sheet to the page, and paste in the following CSS:

@media print {
	header.nav-down,
	#popup,
	#popup-trigger,
	#progress,
	section.prev_next,
	.footnotes-list li .close {
		display: none;
	}
	.notes-container,
	.footnotes-list li {
		position: static;
		max-width: unset;
	}
	.notes-container {
		width: var(--maxwidth-text);
		margin: 3em auto 3em auto;
		padding: 1em 0 0 1em;
		border-top: 1px solid black;
	}
	.footnotes-list li {
		width: unset;
		margin: 1em auto;	
		display: list-item;
		padding: 0;
		border: none;
		list-style-type: decimal;
	}
}

2. Use your browser’s Print… command to save the page as a PDF.

(This is possible on a Mac, and I think also on Windows; I don’t know about Linux.)

It would be easy for someone to create such PDFs of all the currently available articles, to combine them into one file, to convert to ebook format, etc.

I'd like a PDF version too. I appreciated the effort in an online highlighter, but on the PDF I can take arbitrary notes and they will stay saved forever on my computer if I need to find something I read and my thoughts on it, it does happen.

In particular I'd like a PDF with WIDE MARGINS. Not like normal newspaper pdfs were you have to take notes in collapsible stickies or find a sophisticated note-taker app that is not compatible with other readers.

Just chiming in with an extra anecdotal data point that (on my laptop at least) I think the design looks great, from colour scheme to font choice - it's clear that a lot of effort has been put into this. I also really like the save highlight function, which I hadn't seen before, and thought it was a neat design choice to use an asterix there too (as well as the blurbs that come up when you hover over titles). I've only skimmed 1 article so far so can't comment on the content, but definitely would not hesitate to recommend this to people based on its current design, and I'd probably also anti-recommend adding dall-e images (at least the 4 that have come up).

Thanks to Clara and the team who have put this together!

I think Asterisk is deliberately trying to look different from Substack, Medium, news sites, etc., rather than doing so accidentally/ as a product of being unaware of how to look like those sites.

I actually really like the design, and that's despite my being in the "dark theme everything" camp.

This seems to be an issue on mailchimp's end, not ours – their servers have been having outages all morning. I recommend trying again in a bit. 

Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I'll talk to my web developer right away.