The state of the newsletter

[noracharles]

Hi editors :-)

Another week, another newsletter. I wrote in the newsletter that next week's will be published Sunday, because that way I'll be able to take advantage of the auto posts, which should hopefully save me some work.

The thing is, I can't continue to edit by hand, because working with the mouse is too painful for me.

These are our options:

1. Use a perl script to format the newsletter. There is a perl script for formatting the auto post which delicious generates. It has the same problem with text encoding which diigo has, and what's more it requires a perl engine. My website is hosted on someone else's site, so that's not an option. Do any of you have a website with perl?



2. Each of us can edit our links into a template by hand. Since we now have the white_collar_roundup dw, it should be easier than using google docs was. At least for me, google docs crashed constantly and the text field was so tiny I could barely see what I was doing. The huge disadvantage to this option would be that it takes time to scroll up and down looking for the categories, and it would involve either coding which I know is tedious and easy to mess up with a single typo, or it would involve saving to diigo and then exporting the links and re-formatting them, which is also very tedious but at least means a smaller risk of typos.



3. We can continue using diigo. But if we do, we have to be very careful with how we fill in the description and tags, otherwise it won't work:
   • At the end of each line there should be an html linebreak<br>
     not both an html linebreak and an actual linebreak that you can see on your screen
     and no linebreak at the end of the last line or before the beginning of the first line
   • we have to be very strict about removing all special characters, because we don't know yet which of them are messing up the text encoding
   • no apostrophes in tags
   • we have to use consistent category tags, because diigo can't tell that "episode.reaction" and "episode_review" are the same category, or "p.neal_kate" and "p.kate_neal".
   • If you add a new tag you must also add a new auto post for that tag or include a category tag which has already been added as an auto post.
   • We should avoid white space because the layout is very difficult to read, and the spacing is really the only thing visually tying one entry together and distinguishing it from the next.



4. Or, someone other than me can do the final editing and formatting of the newsletter.

I really can't emphasize this enough: If we continue to use diigo, we must be absolutely consistent with tags and careful to avoid code borking, because otherwise there is a lot of editing that must be done before the newsletter is ready to post.

This coming Sunday when diigo auto posts, I'll try marking all the bookmarks as private rather than deleting them. I don't know how often diigo's cache refreshes, but hopefully all the old links won't be posted again next week. It's the only way I can think of to try to keep the tags consistent, because then diigo knows to suggest a tag based on the first few key strokes.

Comments

[ursula4x]

I can't tell how my posts are turning out since I just post and link. Is there a format that I could just cut and paste to each post if it is a problem?

Code borking means nothing to me at all, by the way.

[noracharles]

LOL, sorry. I got a bit jargonny there :-)

What happens is that diigo turns all the tags into links, and the code for the links contains apostrophes in important places. So if the tag itself also contains an apostrophe, dreamwidth goes
O_o I don't know what that means! I'll just write the raw code and hope the human beings reading this can figure out what the heck that is.

And if we write a character which is not one of the normal letters of the English alphabet, diigo saves that character using a special character code, which is unfortunately not the same special character code dreamwidth uses, so when that happens dreamwidth goes
D-: Augh, make it stop, make it stop! No, you can't edit this entry, it has bad and scary code and I don't want to look at it!

And that means borked code that looks like an unreadable mess and no way to edit it or even put in a cut tag.

This is the format I would prefer, but it's not very suitable for cut&pasting:

First line of the description<br>Second line, maybe this is the author name<br>Here's the third line, maybe this is the rating<br>And this is the fourth line, yay!

What I do is I copy and paste the header just as it is. Then I write <br>, and copy and paste that. Then I add the <br> to the end of each line and press delete so the visual linebreak disappears (it looks like there is no linebreak).

Only it didn't work every time, because diigo is so weird, and as you say, there's no way to know for sure how it'll look in the autopost.

[facetofcathy]

I'm not familiar enough with scripts to even tackle that sort of thing.

If the diigo bookmarks have to be deleted or locked then I don't really see the links in the newsletter post that go to the tags as having any utility.

I just tried something using the RTE on the DW posting box--http://facetofcathy.dreamwidth.org/128853.html

What I did was click on the p.gen tag and selected a bunch of bookmarks, cut and pasted them into the RTE and hit post.

The first one has the snapshot and find more from ... links edited out, which can be done from the RTE. I'm not so sure it's all that necessary to do that though.

Could we collect via diigo, not worry about special characters or putting html in for line breaks, just make them look nice, then sort the list by each pairing category, cut and paste in bulk into a template on white_collar_roundup and then make sure the post looks okay--it's got some dates in there that should be taken out, but then the assembly is much quicker and a lot less mouse intensive. (I actually did all that with my keyboard since my Firefox allows keyboard-based text selection (F7 key)

The link text is larger because it's using a heading style, so it's not coding in a font size--it should not break anyone's display then. It looks good in format=light as well as the site scheme style I use for entries.

The other major benefit, besides speed of assembly, and more freedom in bookmark formatting is that the bookmarks can just pile up into a database, since each week only the new ones get copied over.

[noracharles]

Luckily someone has already written a perl script for posting delicious links, so it only needs a website with a perl engine to run it. We wouldn't have to write the script ourselves.

The purpose of the tags is only sorting as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any reason to post them to the newsletter.

That's what I've been doing every week: using diigo to sort the categories, then copy and pasted them into dreamwidth, edited them, and posted them. I don't know how to do that without using the mouse, but if you don't think it's too difficult or time consuming, it'd be great if you could take over that part.

[facetofcathy]

I've got no access to any kind of perl engine.

Heh, I had an interesting employment experience where I was forced to learn keyboard shortcuts for almost everything. (In case you want to try it out: F7 turns on caret browsing in Firefox--which allows you to insert a cursor on the screen with the mouse, then you can select via the keyboard with shift + arrow keys Ctrl C and Ctrl V and away you go.)

Let's see what everybody else wants, make the bookmarks with diigo and then assemble them or make them into a template on white_collar_roundup. I can absolutely assemble the newsletter, not ever on the weekend though, but I have absolutely no interest in using diigo if I have to edit in html and edit out special characters--It really isn't faster for me than just typing into a template. By C&Ping into the RTE, that problem is eliminated, which is my main point with the experiment.

[noracharles]

I really need to learn how to do that in Opera without using the mouse. Usually I don't do anything that requires lots of copy-pasting and button clicking, so I never learned.

If you can assemble the newsletter, that would be such a weight off my shoulders. It doesn't have to be on Sunday, not at all. I only said that because it would be easier for me to use the auto posts, less mouse work that way. You don't have to use them.

If you don't want to use the auto post, but just use diigo to collect and sort the links, then we don't have to worry about special characters. It's not a problem when you cut and paste from diigo, only when diigo posts its own excentrically formatted posts.

For me using google docs was just as fast as using diigo, and editing was significantly easier. I would be just as happy adding my links straight to a template. But Ursula doesn't code, so for her, collecting the links with diigo is a lot quicker than writing the links by hand.

[facetofcathy]

Ursula's doing a lot of link gathering too, I believe--well you all are relative to me I think.

I found diigo faster, only if I could just copy and remove the formating that you get off of the AO3, editing it is a pain.

I would be happy to do the assembly. I would likely do it Friday afternoon my time which is UST - 5 hours. Do we want to stick with diigo for another week and see how it goes? I could collect everything off of diigo on Friday, make a post on white_collar_roundup with the links there, edit it to look nice and put the cuts in, and then, do we want to just post it on Sunday since we said we would?

If we go that route than we need everyone to go back to doing the diigo bookmarks without any html in them.

[noracharles]

Either way is fine with me, I'm just thrilled not to have to do any editing :-D

I think you should post Friday since that's what's most practical for you and that's what we're all used to. I can just edit the newsletter and strike out the thing about Sunday.

[facetofcathy]

Okay, for now, let's not change too much--keep using diigo and I'll see what I can pull together on Friday, then we can revisit the discussion and see what we all think.

[noracharles]

Okay :-)

[neekabe]

Ick, I hadn't realized how much work diigo can be.

I do like how that looks, nice and easy too, with a pretty small opportunity for major errors.

Also it should help tag consistency by not having to remove previous entries (there've been a couple of tags that didn't seem to exist, and I know they were used before. The episode_reactions exists because it wasn't suggesting anything along those lines. I suspect it had something to do with tags no longer existing?)

[noracharles]

Yes, exactly. The problem was that the sorting didn't work very well, and the first time I relied on it I accidentally posted a bunch of old links. I had hoped the tags would remain when I deleted the bookmarks, but no such luck :-(