Magazine to newsletter

Bloke · 2015-07-01 13:11:39

gaekwad wrote #292350:

I promised Stef I’d write some copy for .com blog post about translation strings

Forgot to mention that I prepared the .com blog templates yesterday for the inaugural guest publication. If the template finds a particular custom field in use, it uses it for display purposes in preference to the site author who prepared/published the content. Consolidated a few Forms in the process, which is always nice.

There are no links from that author name yet — that bit can come much later when we have a few under our belt and we figure out how best to create such lists.

Destry · 2015-07-01 14:59:25

Bloke wrote #292344:

So, exploring this notion of an open blog, what infrastructure does it need?

An inbox somewhere that a bunch of us have access to?

You mean like a cloud folder for adding images and such? Yes, better than emailing. Otherwise I don’t know what you mean, I guess.

Some third party content-writing channel that we are pinged about when there’s activity?

This depends on what scale of editorial you’re expecting for the blog. IMO, every channel should have at least one simple review process, however it’s decided. Nobody should be relied on to proof their own work. And who is responsible for fixing the inevitable mistakes discovered after publishing. They’re ever present.

Depending on that, there’s good collaboration tools (Gdocs, Draft…), or there’s allowing people to use their text editor and having to laboriously email annotations back and forth. I do not have any interest in the latter kind of workflow.

Somewhere that acts as a moderation queue of some kind?

To bad this wasn’t part of core. A simpler version of SharePoint docs shuffling. Ha! I don’t know any cheap/easy tool that can provide this. Maybe I don’t understand again. Can you elaborate?

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.

Hmm… well, if the international proposal for the magazine platform falls on dead ears with the non-English folks, then maybe the same open blog idea is Plan B for the mag. Accounts and all.

Stick with the /weblog URL endpoint or change it to something else and add a redirect from /weblog to the new location for old posts?

Well, “weblog” is a dumb label. Call it “blog”. You then ideally audit that old stuff and remove the ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial). Merge anything good into the new pot for cohesiveness and common feel. Don’t look back.

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.

That would be nice. A Gdoc that parses into Txp? Yes!

Or is login and manual wrangling necessary, given the sensitive nature of the .com domain being the key to our downloads?

Probably.

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.

Looks like we’re thinking alike about a possible Plan B (Plan C?) for the magazine. Question now is which has priority. We’ve opened a can of worms, maybe. Should I revise my draft proposal?

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?

I guess I’m still hazy on the technical constraints, but, Oof!, anytime we can avoid the need for manually written emails in favor of auto-nofiications, it’s preferred by me. Ancient collaboration practices for the stubborn would kill it for me.

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… :-)

Won’t be a problem if it turns out to be the mag; its twitter account is alive and well. Others can share the shouting role elsewhere.

Destry · 2015-07-01 15:09:19

Destry wrote #292446:

Hmm… well, if the international proposal for the magazine platform falls on dead ears with the non-English folks, then maybe the same open blog idea is Plan B for the mag. Accounts and all.

But it it does go down that road of refactoring the magazine as the “open blog”, then it doesn’t make sense for .com to keep a “weblog” too. Either way, this spells the end for the dev blog. Can it.

Bloke · 2015-07-01 15:34:05

Destry wrote #292446:

You mean like a cloud folder for adding images and such?

Yeah, Google Docs is fine, but I think it falls down on any images that go along with the publication. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not a big user.

Regarding moderation queue, it was just an extension of the following notion from a potential contributor’s viewpoint:

I have an article I want to publish on .com, yay.
Write / write / edit / hack / done.
Now to send it somewhere for approval… erm…

The options are:

a central email inbox, which caters for attachments but isn’t conducive for the back-and-forth editing workflow. Plus if it’s a shared inbox, who knows who is collaborating on which submission? Messy.
publish it in a central location (e.g. GDocs). Back-and-forth takes place via comments. More visibility here of who is interacting in the dialogue which maybe negates the need for a signalling mechanism to say who’s working with whom on what. But no(?) or little(?) attachment support.
a moderation queue, if such a thing exists. You post your publication to some endpoint / service in its entirety — zipped, whatever — and it sits in a holding area. All editors (subscribers) are notified of the new arrival and one of them can then elect to “grab” that project to work on. Then it’s “locked” so nobody duplicates effort, and the back-and-forth editing process between editor and content publisher begins.

The final stage, once approval is reached, is the process of publishing it. Currently we only have a limited set of accounts on .com for very good security reasons. At the moment, the person who is going to push the ‘Publish’ button has to log in, create article, copy and paste content in, set images, set meta fields, tags, categories, blah blah and then hit the button. Seems like a monumental waste / duplication of effort.

I was merely postulating that it’d be nice if there was an external tool, or *gasp* an internal plugin that could accept the publication in some pre-determined format and take the drudgery out of preparing the article, leaving the publisher’s only job as proofreading the Draft, setting the status Live and hitting Save.

I like your standard template format for publications as that is a partial solution. If it could be made more easily machine-readable / parsable as well as remaining human readable, that would take 90% of the effort out since the same doc that is done to reach the final draft is the one you import for publication.

In fact, if we can nail down a file format, I can feel a plugin coming on to do just that… :-)

Well, “weblog” is a dumb label.

I agree. Been wanting to change that for years.

philwareham · 2015-07-01 15:52:26

Speaking from my side and bearing in mind I’ve already done some work on new .com code:

1. I’d prefer the blog to stay on the .com website, with the minimum added plugins/custom code as possible.

2. The current .com site’s URL structure should be revisited for a more modern web…

http://textpattern.com/weblog/381/meta-description-keyword-and-author-amendments

Becomes…

http://textpattern.com/blog/meta-description-keyword-and-author-amendments

3. Google Docs is OK at collaborative writing but it doesn’t export to Textile. Destry mentioned Draft by Draftin in the past – it exports to Markdown but you could then convert that to Textile using an app I guess prior to placing into Textpattern?

4. A couple of trusted users could be set up with accounts on .com to get the bits from wherever into Textpattern. As long as blog articles follow a set of formatting rules the effort involved could be kept to a minimum. Ditto for images – a set of pixel size rules and compression rules could be provided so that images are of acceptable quality.

Destry · 2015-07-01 15:54:19

Bloke wrote #292449:

Yeah, Google Docs is fine, but I think it falls down on any images that go along with the publication.

I’ve never liked the rigid proprietary way Google handles images, maybe it has changed. I don’t know either. But I don’t let that bring me down. I just drop images into a Dropbox and link to the images from the draft article.

Another thing that worked for me once was to just put the images in the draft (giving better article presentation perspective), then extracting the images from the draft itself. Not sure if you get the full size file, though. Can’t remember.

You might want to look at Asana again. I need to as well. It has evolved a lot in the last two years. There might be easier file attachment features there per article per user, whatever. Could be something there to address all those coordination concerns and keep it straight too.

Destry · 2015-07-01 15:59:19

So we promote the magazine as a new self-regimented international channel, and re-employ the editor-in-chief to .com for the prerequisite and inevitable fine-tuning of community contributions. ;)

Bloke · 2015-07-01 16:00:50

philwareham wrote #292452:

I’d prefer the blog to stay on the .com website

Yep.

with the minimum added plugins/custom code as possible.

Sure. No custom code required. I was proposing an importy type plugin, but if we can streamline the workflow elsewhere that’s fine.

The current .com site’s URL structure should be revisited

Yay!

As long as blog articles follow a set of formatting rules the effort involved could be kept to a minimum.

Amen to this.

philwareham · 2015-07-01 16:03:16

Destry wrote #292455:

So we promote the magazine as a new self-regimented international channel, and re-employ the editor-in-chief to .com for the prerequisite and inevitable fine-tuning of community contributions. ;)

Sounds good to me :)

We can thrash out a set of guidelines for blog posts on Google Docs as a starting point. There may be a couple of image size requirements at first due to the old and new site designs having to be used in parallel. Nothing to worry about though.

Destry · 2015-07-02 09:40:56

I was just being a little cheeky, but we could consider that for reelz. I have to be careful about my time commitment, though, because I’m already responsible for a lot in my founder/editor role at CSF (new since the magazine was first launched), and that’s going to pick up soon for a number of reasons, including stuff related with the 2016 conference. But, I would like to help with content quality control where it can fit in.

I’m still keen to help with docs editing too, as time allows, mainly because I want an excuse to use Github more in whatever way I can. ;)

I’d not forget about David (wavesource) either, and maybe one more (whether me or some other valiant soul), in tandem, who can help with the receiving/fixing/date-publishing side of things. As far as the blog goes, that’s really where roles need filled, right? Two people should be able to handle that in alternate fashion. Those people, along with yourselves, could then outline/produce the workflow plan, tools, guidelines, etc to make it all work smoothly.

Destry · 2015-07-02 09:44:05

Btw, what is the status with blog vs. newsletter? Is it decided to be one in the same thing now? If not, I’d see about giving newsletter marketing to David, if we’s wiling.

A push newsletter that built up a list of contacts in return would not be a bad thing for the future. The slow assembly of a media team would not be a bad thing either.

Is it possible to pull emails from the forum? That would be a nice way to prime the newsletter list. ;)

Last edited by Destry (2015-07-02 09:53:53)

philwareham · 2015-07-02 09:53:30

Destry wrote #292480:

I was just being a little cheeky, but we could consider that for reelz.

I would just have to confirm it with Robert, but if the result is more blogging then I’m all for it. I will make the blog more prominent, easier to find and read, on the new site design so this also lends it more weight to that content.

I’d say blog is more important than newsletter at this moment. Once we have a new site further along and actually, hopefully, the textpattern.com DNS within our control, I can look at a newsletter subscription service (probably on MailChimp since I already know and like that platform).

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#37 2015-07-01 13:11:39

Re: Magazine to newsletter

gaekwad wrote #292350:

#38 2015-07-01 14:59:25

Re: Magazine to newsletter

Bloke wrote #292344:

#39 2015-07-01 15:09:19

Re: Magazine to newsletter

Destry wrote #292446:

#40 2015-07-01 15:34:05

Re: Magazine to newsletter

Destry wrote #292446:

#41 2015-07-01 15:52:26

Re: Magazine to newsletter

#42 2015-07-01 15:54:19

Re: Magazine to newsletter

Bloke wrote #292449:

#43 2015-07-01 15:59:19

Re: Magazine to newsletter

#44 2015-07-01 16:00:50

Re: Magazine to newsletter

philwareham wrote #292452:

#45 2015-07-01 16:03:16

Re: Magazine to newsletter

Destry wrote #292455:

#46 2015-07-02 09:40:56

Re: Magazine to newsletter

#47 2015-07-02 09:44:05

Re: Magazine to newsletter

#48 2015-07-02 09:53:30

Re: Magazine to newsletter

Destry wrote #292480:

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