Thanks to everyone who has finished their beats! If you are working on a beat for this week and are still working on it, please take a moment to update the status on the Beat page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Beats -- many thanks!
I will start preparing the page for issue 136 tonight, and we'll send this out tomorrow morning.
- pascal
On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:09:03 -0400, "Pascal Calarco" pcalarco@nd.edu said:
Thanks to everyone who has finished their beats! If you are working on a beat for this week and are still working on it, please take a moment to update the status on the Beat page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Beats -- many thanks!
I will start preparing the page for issue 136 tonight, and we'll send this out tomorrow morning.
Thank you Pascal,
I've edited:
FWN/Beats/Announcements Max Spevack COMPLETE FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora Max Spevack COMPLETE FWN/Beats/Developments Oisin Feeley COMPLETE FWN/Beats/Artwork Nicu Buculei COMPLETE
I took a look at the excellent FWN/Beats/Marketing (thanks for such a readable column) and noticed that people's names were not presented as wikilinks. I changed a couple as an example. Theoretically we should be boldfacing GUI application names in our markup, but I'm just using two single ticks as I think our export to plaintext would be a bit weird with three.
Other issues we need to consider are the format of the FWN/Beats/Welcome (which should contain a brief summary of choice items from the beats designed to hook a potential reader's interest) and the publishing of the RSS/Atom feed as brought up previously on the list. I've noticed that on LWN our FWN post is no longer a complete text dump, but is now merely a link back to our wiki page. Is that what we want?
OK, thanks for taking care of pushing out this issue. I'm off to get some sunshine while it lasts!
Oisin Feeley wrote:
On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:09:03 -0400, "Pascal Calarco" pcalarco@nd.edu said:
Thanks to everyone who has finished their beats! If you are working on a beat for this week and are still working on it, please take a moment to update the status on the Beat page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Beats -- many thanks!
I will start preparing the page for issue 136 tonight, and we'll send this out tomorrow morning.
Thank you Pascal,
I've edited:
FWN/Beats/Announcements Max Spevack COMPLETE FWN/Beats/PlanetFedora Max Spevack COMPLETE FWN/Beats/Developments Oisin Feeley COMPLETE FWN/Beats/Artwork Nicu Buculei COMPLETE
Thanks! I also checked Max's, David's and Nicu's beats earlier today. Not a bad thing to have multiple sets of eyes on these at all.
I took a look at the excellent FWN/Beats/Marketing (thanks for such a readable column) and noticed that people's names were not presented as wikilinks. I changed a couple as an example. Theoretically we should be boldfacing GUI application names in our markup, but I'm just using two single ticks as I think our export to plaintext would be a bit weird with three.
A good suggestion, and perhaps we should add this to the workflow page. The StyleGuide does not mention references for Fedora contributors as wiki-links specifically, although some beat writers have been using this and I think it would be good practice to make this explicit.
One other style issue is that we should probably edit for a common tense through the entire issue. Some beat writers have been writing in present tense with others writing in past tense. Max's announcements is in present tense in this issue for example, while others are in the past tense. Since we're covering developments over the past week, I might suggest that we write/edit everything in the past tense. Sound okay to everyone?
Other issues we need to consider are the format of the FWN/Beats/Welcome (which should contain a brief summary of choice items from the beats designed to hook a potential reader's interest) and the publishing of the RSS/Atom feed as brought up previously on the list. I've noticed that on LWN our FWN post is no longer a complete text dump, but is now merely a link back to our wiki page. Is that what we want?
Looking back at the fedora-announce archives, this practice changed from Thomas Chung's last issue (128) and the first one Max edited (129) [2]. I agree that it is better that we push out the entire issue with all of the text to fedora-announce. Max et. al.: does anyone feel strongly that we should only push the short announcement for FWN announcements instead of the full text of the issue?
As for the RSS/Atoms feeds, there was some discussion some time ago that this would be more cleanly achieved by moving FWN to Wordpress, and that the Infrastructure team was going to get this in place for us. I checked the hosted requests[3], and there isn't an active ticket for this. Do we still want to move to Wordpress, and if so, should we open a new ticket to request this be made available to the News project?
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-April/msg00008.htm...
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-June/msg00001.html
[3] https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/
OK, thanks for taking care of pushing out this issue. I'm off to get some sunshine while it lasts!
Enjoy! I am putting off mowing the lawn, myself :)
- pascal
On Sun, 27 Jul 2008, Pascal Calarco wrote:
One other style issue is that we should probably edit for a common tense through the entire issue. Some beat writers have been writing in present tense with others writing in past tense. Max's announcements is in present tense in this issue for example, while others are in the past tense. Since we're covering developments over the past week, I might suggest that we write/edit everything in the past tense. Sound okay to everyone?
Sure, past tense from now on! I need to go back and look at the tense I wrote the Planet Beat in... my guess would be past, since I wrote that in one big chunk on Saturday, but I do the announcements beat each day as messages come through, which is probably why I wrote it in present tense.
But standardizing on tense is a very good idea.
Looking back at the fedora-announce archives, this practice changed from Thomas Chung's last issue (128) and the first one Max edited (129) [2]. I agree that it is better that we push out the entire issue with all of the text to fedora-announce. Max et. al.: does anyone feel strongly that we should only push the short announcement for FWN announcements instead of the full text of the issue?
Well, let's just go back to the way Thomas used to do it, then. The change was probably just an oversight on my part.
Thanks for all your editing work this week, team! It makes me very happy to see Fedora Weekly News still thriving and doing well.
One style question for the editors:
I changed the way I write the Planet beat this week, moving it to more of a narrative with links embedded than a straight up "So and so said $FOO". Which way do you like better?
--Max
Max Spevack wrote:
One style question for the editors:
I changed the way I write the Planet beat this week, moving it to more of a narrative with links embedded than a straight up "So and so said $FOO". Which way do you like better?
I'd say it is a lot more interesting reading the way you have it here, Max, and less cluttered. Oisin has a really nice narrative style too. A bit more work up-front to write and structure, but more reader-friendly.
One thing I wonder about though is: does this have any impact on how the issue goes out to fedora-announce-list? I have looked at some of Thomas' edited issues in the list archives, and thought of this.
--Max
- pascal
On Sun, 27 Jul 2008, Pascal Calarco wrote:
One thing I wonder about though is: does this have any impact on how the issue goes out to fedora-announce-list? I have looked at some of Thomas' edited issues in the list archives, and thought of this.
Now that you mention that, it does make me wonder. The way I wrote that beat this week does make it more narrative, but unless you are reading it in a browser or browser-aware email client, it does take away the usefulness. What I probably need to do next week is keep that narrative style, but also include at the bottom the URLs that I linked to.
--Max