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.

[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.