In the long history of amateur journalism, paper-based technologies were the starting point, and remained so up till today. The (mostly) boy printers who began NAPA in 1876 used letterpress printing. As technology advanced, all of the following technologies have been used: offset printing, mimeograph and hectograph duplication, typewriter manuscripts, calligraphy originals and copies, photocopying and, most recently, computer printers. But they were all used to produce amateur journals on paper.

The World Wide Web offers an alternative: non-paper digital production. It is already widely used for myriad governmental, corporate, non-governmental and personal publishing ventures, but has not been used with organized amateur journalism till now as far as we know, except in the American Amateur Press Association, which is now posting its membership list on a password-protected website.

This portion of our website is for NAPA members who want to try out publishing an amateur journal on the web, not on paper.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMITTING YOUR WEB-BASED AMATEUR JOURNAL

Bill Boys serves as the webmaster for this portion of the NAPA website. Arie Koelewyn is the overall webmaster. Members should email the digital file of their web-based amateur journal to Bill Boys for posting.

We're just starting out, so experience may necessitate changes as we go, but here are our starting guidelines.

The same requirements of an amateur journal (see Art. IV of the NAPA constitution) also apply here: your web-based amateur journal must have a title, it must have either a number or a date, or both, and you must identify yourself in it. (And be a member of NAPA.) If you omit any of those, it will either be adde d before posting, or else you will be asked to make the correction and re-send your journal.

You may design your journal in any format that can be uploaded and viewed here. The most common formats are HTML and PDF. If you submit in some other format we'll give it a shot and I trust you can advise us about any tricky issues that might arise when it goes up on the site.

Please put a link in your amateur journal to the NAPA website homepage, http://www.amateurpress.org, and to the WebAJ Page for the convenience of visitors to the site, and so that when non-members visit, they can readily find out how to join and publish their own amateur journal, whether web-based or print-based. Other links, either to anchors within your journal or to other sites on the web, are entirely up to you, of course.

If you have your own server space elsewhere, or just prefer to publish your amateur journal on a different server, we will be happy to put a link to it on this site so long as it qualifies as a NAPA amateur journal in other respects.