1. What is "The Ezine Machine"?

The Ezine Machine is a free directory of electronic mail publications (aka "ezines"). You can either browse the ezines by topic or search for a keyword. It is free to browse the directory. It's also free to suggest other ezines for inclusion in the directory.

2. What's an ezine?

The word ezine is a contraction of "Electronic magaZINE", although the word itself actually traces directly to the word "`Zine", which comes from science fiction fandom, where it denotes a magazine that is written by and for science fiction fans. The original ezines were `zines in electronic form, hence the name.

For the purposes of The Ezine Machine, any publication that is distributed by email and that has a centralized subscription process is eligible to be included in the directory.

3. How do I get my ezine listed on The Ezine Machine?

There's a form for that. Fill it out, submit it, and give us a chance to verify the information. You'll be notified when we add it to our directory.

4. How long does it take to get an ezine listed?

That depends on the workload of our editors. Typically, a new ezine listing will be added within a week of being submitted, although it could take as long as six or eight weeks.

5. Is there any way to get listed faster?

Feel free to contact us when you submit an ezine. If the editors can fit it into their schedule, your submission is likely to be reviewed that day.

6. When I try to subscribe to an ezine, I get this little window on my screen for a few seconds. What is that?

In order to track ezine popularity, all of the subscribe links actually go through a redirector (you can see this in the status bar when you pass your mouse pointer over the subscribe link). Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well with ezines where you send an email message to subscribe. Redirecting to a so-called "mailto:" URL pops up a blank email message, but it also leaves your browser window blank.

Rather than leaving your main browser window blank, redirects to "mailto:" URLs actually target a different window. It's this window that you see for a few seconds when you click on a subscribe link. It's created by a JavaScript handler when you click on the subscribe link, and it only sticks around long enough to ensure that your email program wakes up.

7. When I subscribe to an ezine, I get a blank browser window. What happened?

This happens when you try to subscribe to an ezine and you've turned off JavaScript in your browser. A full explanation is under question #6 above. The window is full-sized and persistent because it's created as a consequence of normal browser functioning, not JavaScript - the link is supposed to be opened in a different window, so the browser opens a new window. It will stick around because there's no JavaScript handler available to close it.

8. What are "Popular searches"?

The "Popular searches" are determined by the most popular search terms used on several large general-purpose search engines, and reported by Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/), a company that collects and compiles keyword metrics data from several meta-search engines. The current list is fifty-four terms that have broad appeal over a prolonged period of time.

9. I'm looking for an ezine that covers X. Do you have one?

You can enter any search terms you want in the search box on every page. The search engine portion of the site is a bit simple-minded, however.

Words are considered individually, and the order does not matter (a search for "april fool" and "fool april" will return the same results).

10. What is the article repository?

It's a searchable and browsable database of freely-republishable articles suitable for use in ezines. The only restriction on their use is that they be included exactly the way they are presented - you are not allowed to edit them for content or length. The only acceptable change is a conversion from plain text to HTML or from HTML to plain text.

11. How do I add an article to the repository?

You can enter it in the form here. Please contact us if you have several articles you'd like to submit. Please read the terms and conditions before you submit an article.

12. Will you link to my site?

We don't have a separate "Links" page, so the only way to get a link from this site is to submit an ezine associated with your site. We do occasionally link to sites from our What's New page, but to date that's never happened as a result of a link trade request.