Christoph Noack wrote:
Hi Florian, Brian and Dennis!
A similar discussion has been started quite recently on the website-dev
mailing list. To be honest, it has been started by me and the number of
responses has been ... concise :-)
Maybe that can be easily changed with your help. Basically, there are
several more or less independent blogs/planets/information sources which
miss a common design and a central location. For example: the marketing
blog, the NLC planet, GullFOSS, the UX team blog, ...
Since about one year we have the OpenOffice.org Planet which aggregates
information and also allows to set-up sub-blogs. Might this be helpful
for the marketing? And, since they are based on the same structure,
other planets and the main site would have some benefit, too.
Please read on here (and come back for the rest of the mail *g*):
http://website.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=11193
FYI: This link didn't work for me...
Florian, the UX team faces a pretty similar situation. That is how we
try to address it:
* Blogs: The Sun employees do use GullFOSS exclusively. Since only
few people have an own blog, we set up a Blogspot blog for the
community (similar to the ooomarketing, see [1]).
* Aggregation: We use a sub-planet of the official OOo Planet to
aggregate our postings from Sun and other community members.
That allows us to present UX topics only [2].
* Aggregation²: We added the same sources to the official OOo
Planet to present it to the whole community. The advantage is -
when having only few postings - that there is sufficient traffic
which covers the whole world around OOo. [3]
* Blogspot design: Some time ago, I started to adapt the simple
theme to better match the OOo colors. I know that it is fa...ar
from perfect, but maybe it is a starting point.
[1] http://uxopenofficeorg.blogspot.com/
[2] http://planet.services.openoffice.org/ux
[3] http://planet.services.openoffice.org
Aehm, there are still some unresolved issues. But anyway, I hope it
helps a bit to continue the discussion. Maybe there is a chance to not
only improve marketing stuff, but also all kind of news und buzz around
OOo ;-)
By the way, it seems that there are no links between ooomarketing and
OOo Planet - and vice versa. Strange...
This, to me, is one of the main issues with the blogs: Accessibility. It
took me some effort to find the Marketing Blog and I was specifically
looking for it.
Am Samstag, den 02.01.2010, 13:28 +0100 schrieb Florian Effenberger:
Hi Brian,
I'm new to the project, so it took me a little while to find it, but I
found the blog, and yes, it does look a bit spare. I noticed you're
using Blogger for the backend, I don't really have much experience with
Blogger as I tend to use Wordpress (my Wordpress blog is
http://briancoale.com/blog/ ), but I'd be happy to help out with what I
can. I can provide artwork, ideas, and if you'd like me to look at the
backend to see if I can figure out how to integrate it into the blog
(I'm not sure if Blogger uses themes and such?), I'd be happy to. Just
some nice artwork & a little tidying up would make that blog look a lot
nicer, and it'd be a shame to scrap the whole thing for what seems to be
a solvable aesthetics issue. Let me know.
thanks for your reply!
We currently use Blogger, but I plan to set-up an own blog, self-hosted,
and import the existing postings. WordPress is one option, so we are
rather flexible later on.
The main problem at the moment is, that there are not many postings to
the blog. Having a nice blog is good, but without much of content, it's
not representative. So, next to the design, I also look for regular
contributors :-)
Aehm, seems the issues are identical to the UX blog ;-)
Have a nice day,
Christoph
I don't know the politics of the different teams & groups in the
community, but I for one am positive on the thought of unifying some of
the disparate elements. For one, it will make ALL of the information
easier to find, and secondly it will likely drive more traffic to the
blog. More traffic = more posts = greater interest in the blog. Since
most blogs separate posts into categories there's little need to worry
about organizing posts from differing groups (e.g. category="Marketing",
category="UX", etc). I'm not sure exactly what all of the particulars
would be, but I do believe the community could benefit from a more
unified blog space.
Also, I personally would recommend Wordpress over Blogger. Obviously
it's nice that Blogger hosts you blog for you, but it seems to fall well
short of the kind of customization and extensibility Wordpress offers.
Plus it just seems to make sense: Wordpress is Open Source and is
supported by a large community of people who write plugins and themes,
and offer technical advice and support for, the project. Sound a little
familiar? The only downside is someone would have to offer hosting, a
domain and set up a MySQL database for it. All of this is easy enough to
do, but not free.
-Brian
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