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

[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 :-)