"Why isn't DominoPower built in Domino?" We're asked that constantly. The short answer is that we're editors and publishers using the same, pre-existing journal production system we use for PalmPower and other journals that are currently in production. This technology that we've built our business upon makes it possible for us to launch DominoPower. We love Domino and think it's awesome, so we wanted to do a publication in support of it. In this article, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz takes you inside DominoPower so you can learn more about why we built DominoPower the way we did.

Running a journal is always a challenge. DominoPower is the sixth journal I've run, and there's always something interesting you can't predict. Often, it's simple things, like an author didn't turn in an article on time, or something doesn't format correctly, or a fact can't be confirmed. But there are also those times when challenges come from completely unexpected corners.

We've got one of those with DominoPower Magazine.

It turns out we're getting three kinds of reader comments about DominoPower. The first two categories were pretty predictable. They're the "we like your journal" and "could you write about" kinds of comments. But the third category of comment was surprising to us. We're regularly getting asked "How come DominoPower isn't written in Domino?"

I guess we should have predicted it. Domino is an excellent document production system and we're producing documents. And the open nature of the web (as well as Domino's rather unique URLs) makes it pretty easy to see that DominoPower is produced using different tools (hang in there, more on that in a moment). Since DominoPower readers are exceptionally web-savvy, it makes sense that they'd be able to dig inside and see how our system is put together. So we probably should have predicted the question.

But we didn't. Getting a magazine started (especially for a tiny company) is a huge effort. Our time was spent wrangling authors, changing logos, following up with advertisers for their ads, fighting with our ISPs to get us the bandwidth, editing, copy editing, final editing, and formatting. And a little praying. We were so focussed on the editorial management aspects that we missed the sociological aspects.