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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Bloke wrote #292334:
Maybe the ‘dev’ blog angle is wrong? Maybe it shouldn’t just be a channel for devs to sporadically spout about stuff but a channel for anyone to spout what’s going on in their Textpattern world?
Yes, anything Textpattern related or sometimes not Textpattern specifically but trends and tech and suchlike is all fair game for a blog.
Basically, a regular blog shows the project is still alive to users.
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
milosevic wrote #292323:
…If we ran a MLP txpmag version, I (and others) could translate contents into Spanish what means give a lot of visibility to TXP for millions of native Spanish speakers.
That doesn’t solve the problem that no English content is contributed to begin with. So there’s nothing to translate in that respect.
In the opposite way, If someone native English feels confortable translating Spanish, I feel confident for write some stuff (tips & tricks), or perhaps I could write something in English but someone should check my posts before publishing.
That’s not me, but if there are any Spanish-to-English translators out there that want to coordinate and edit author contributions for that language, they should speak up.
But realize, either of those ideas is still a lot of work. The editorial process in just one language is a lot of work, but introduce a translation workflow too and you’ve just made it exponentially harder (more time, effor, and coordination is needed), and more so with each additional language.
sacripant wrote #292297:
It’s probably true, Textpattern English community is too small for a magazine. But Textpattern is available in over 40 different languages… and Internet is a multilingual ecosystem.
If you found some chief editor in other langage than english, you can open the magazine to other language so other contributors.
So what you’re suggesting is the magazine changes to a different language? Which one? And who’s this chief editor I’m supposed to find?
That doesn’t make sense for two reasons:
- It’s already been passed down from Txp that the working language for this project is English. I.e., the language that Team Textpattern operates by. Since the magazine is a Textpattern property, I’d think that nullifies your suggestion, but that’s for them to decide, not me.
- Anyone can start a non-English magazine about Textpattern. It doesn’t have to be TXP Mag. Nicholas is talking about using the .fr domain (not sure what’s up his sleeve there). How about creating a French magazine with it?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for supporting the international community, but it has to make sense, and so far this doesn’t under the current circumstances.
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
philwareham wrote #292336:
a regular blog shows the project is still alive to users.
And anyone who complains there’s no activity has themself partially to blame :-D
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Bloke, Phil,
+1 on all that.
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Bloke wrote #292339:
And anyone who complains there’s no activity has themself partially to blame :-D
True, I think I’ve only done one official blog since being a dev – my bad!
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Ultimately we come to the question of what to do with txpmag.com if it’s not going to actually work as a project magazine.
I can’t answer that because my role was as editor in favor of making a magazine work. But without a budget, or even a modicum of coin flowage through the pipes, that might otherwise entice knowledgable writers, then my role as magazine editor comes to an end and the property owner has to make a decision.
One option for the property owner, assuming they think a magazine can still work, is to find another editor to take up the monumental task. Another option is to turn the property into something else, but the domain name itself kind of limits that.
A third crazy option that addresses the multi-lingual slant is to open it up as a multilingual “community” magazine. In other words, we don’t worry about translation, writers can submit whatever language they want and that gets published for whoever can read it, though someone should make attempts to keep languages staggered as much as possible. There should still be some editing attempts, of course (and appointed editors in the CMS for each language in that respect), but no effort at trying to unify articles to one language standard. Any respectable topic goes if it just means getting people writing. A set of categories for each language makes it easy to RSS each stream? Etc.
Last edited by Destry (2015-06-30 09:38:08)
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
So, exploring this notion of an open blog, what infrastructure does it need?
- An inbox somewhere that a bunch of us have access to?
- Some third party content-writing channel that we are pinged about when there’s activity?
- Somewhere that acts as a moderation queue of some kind?
- A way to tag an article as from a contributing author (a custom field?) and maybe a way on .com to filter content by contributing author? Although it’d primarily be a newsletter channel, some way to slice and dice the content might be handy when searching for posts. Bear in mind that, without each contributor having an actual account, we can’t leverage the built-in author tags / URL flow.
- Stick with the
/weblogURL endpoint or change it to something else and add a redirect from/weblogto the new location for old posts? - Think about a seamless way for content to be “approved” and “tagged” instead of having to log into .com, go to the Write panel, paste the content in, set the categories, set the custom fields, Publish. Or is login and manual wrangling necessary, given the sensitive nature of the .com domain being the key to our downloads? If so, is there anywhere else, less sensitive, we could move the blog to and redirect existing links? TXP Mag maybe, since we have the contributing author thing set up already? We could read the feed from there and list the content on .com for added visibility, with links to the actual content in TXP Mag’s newsletter channel.
Are there any cool workflow tools out there that could help us achieve this? Or is an email inbox the simplest, lowest cost of ownership solution in the KISS mould?
Then there’s the need for a way to get the message out that the blog is in the hands of the community too. Twitter, G+, here, on the weblog itself… :-)
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Destry wrote #292343:
A third crazy option that addresses the multi-lingual slant is to open it up as a multilingual “community” magazine. In other words, we don’t worry about translation, writers can submit whatever language they want and that gets published for whoever can read it, though someone should make attempts to keep languages staggered as much as possible. There should still be some editing attempts, of course (and appointed editors in the CMS for each language in that respect), but no effort at trying to unify articles to one language standard. Any respectable topic goes if it just means getting people writing. A set of categories for each language makes it easy to RSS each stream? Etc.
In fact, the magazine could be for every language except English, with all English writing efforts going to the Textpattern blog.
I’m starting to like this idea.
So, to summarize, the “international” magazine would:
- Be open to any language writer. No translation needed.
- A language editor must first be appointed in the system before any articles for that language are published. (Addressing the serious matter of quality control. You don’t want evil being published unknowingly by someone from the Far East, for example.)
- Articles in any given languages should be staggered as much as possible to avoid bias of long streams of one language only. (Maybe we keep the “issue” model and each issue is composed of one article from various languages. An issues doesn’t publish unless there’s at least two.)
- Languages have their own RSS feeds.
Other?
Imagine the fun design ideas to be had with this too… a different theme/typography, for example, for each language type, where it would work culturally.
Last edited by Destry (2015-06-30 09:58:18)
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Destry wrote #292346:
Imagine the fun design ideas to be had with this
That’s just crazy enough to work. Explore…
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
OK, I promised Stef I’d write some copy for .com blog post about translation strings – so I’ll get that done by this weekend.
That ticks the boxes for a) English language content b) an international twist c) a non-dev person as the author d) a call to action and e) a refocus on the summer 2015 epic The Road to 4.6.
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
Bloke wrote #292347:
That’s just crazy enough to work. Explore…
Well, none of that will get done if left to me. For this to work at all, those respective “languages” need to coordinate themselves and make the mechanics happen. And that likely means Txp giving reps from each language the ability to merge their stuff. Someone has to oversee all that from Txp’s side.
Basically, for those non-English speakers trying to promote using the magazine for non-English content, they need to put their actions where their ideas are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Re: Magazine to newsletter
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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