12 replies to this topic

[Noor]

I would like to suggest to keep a record of the people that are welling to write Articles/Tutorials. The way to do that is opening a sticky in the "Articles Discussion" section titled "upcoming Articles/Tutorials". If anyone is welling to write something, we can post it there mentioning the topic s/he is welling to write on. This way it'll motivate the author. We had several ppl here welling to write Articles/Tutorials since the past 3 months but nothing showed up. We want to keep the Articles/Tutorials alive. Suggestions & Feedbacks are welcomed.

[baldurk]

the problem being people saying they will then forgetting to, or not getting around to it, or having outside commitments, etc etc.

[Kenneth Gorking]

...or replying when they are drunk :D

[NomadRock]

maybe you should learn to never visit devmaster while drunk.

[TheCell]

A feature that would be really cool and that I've never seen is some kind of tracking record for an article. Let's say that I want to write an article. I might have different sets for my article, like general writing, the layout, pictures, code snippet, correcting/translating, etc... It would be very cool and useful(at least to me) to have some kind of interface to write an article directly for devmaster, and directly ON the site, through the web interface. This way, people could see pending articles, and article writer could have a safe place to keep the article. Although wikipedia is somehow like it, it's too open for that purpose. And with that feature, we could see some kind of progress bar, reflected in a % writen, % of the layout, % of the translation, etc... I don't know if it's really clear what I'm trying to explain, but just ask if it's still confusing, because for me it seems clear.

[cdgray]

hey theCell, I like your idea very much. This would encourage people to submit articles. On the other hand, some people who already wrote their article in HTML or something, might feel lazy converting it this site's standards. Anyhow, it is a great idea and you got my vote.

Or, why not just have a wikipedia here so that anyone can submit anything.

[baldurk]

perhaps an option to write on-site. But for example I'd feel uncomfortable using anything other than xemacs ;P.

[Dia]

TheCell, this is a very good idea. Thanks for bringing it up.

This would also relieve us from doing lots of work (formatting the html, posting, etc.), since it would be done by the user. All what the moderator would have to do is approve the article and maybe edit it a bit. One problem might be in uploading images and source code. But as cdgray said, having a wiki would also serve the same purpose, and at the same time address other things besides articles. Maybe we should discuss this in more detail to know which is better: should we have a wiki or just have something similar to what TheCell suggested?

baldurk: Maybe I misunderstood what you mean, but if you're comfortable posting on the forums, then you should be comfortable posting an article since it would use the same tags (e.g. [b]...[ /b], [url ]...[ /url].., etc.).

[baldurk]

Dia said:

baldurk: Maybe I misunderstood what you mean, but if you're comfortable posting on the forums, then you should be comfortable posting an article since it would use the same tags (e.g. ..., ..., etc.).

writing a forum post is different from writing an article. I prefer editing large chunks of text in an editor I'm familiar with.

[Dia]

I see what you mean. It's a good point, it's just a matter of getting used to it. Or just write your article in your favorite editor and then paste it into the site.

[NomadRock]

As far as tags go, I am very comfortable with either just writing in forum tags using my favorite editor (vim) or just simply writing a program that converts normal html tags to forum tags.

[TheCell]

Just to clear the confusion, that last post(#12) came from me