Allan: > > news.inc => news/news.inc > should either be split into [half-]year long archives > or we make a news/news.php3 that lets you "scroll" through the > list (news/news.php3?2 to get the news from the second pageful > of news_items) Sure. Naming things news_1999.php3 and linking them from the bottom of news.php3 would be clear and simple. And I think once per year maintenance isn't too bad. > news/format.inc > clean up so we get prettier looking entries > I'd like the news category beside the news title in news_item > for example -- at for the LDN issues anyway. Can't hurt. All that stuff was somewhat hacked together and I"m sure there's room for improvement. > I took a look at AbiWord's news page yesterday to see what the > competition are doing. Seems statistics are all the rage. > > Anyway, we trounce them on number of languages supported: 20 vs 15. > And nobody else does RTL that I'm aware of (living in my little > cocoon). Hold up! I'm not sure that we should be looking at them as competition. I've seen many "why should I use LyX instead of Word" mails but not one abiword one yet. The number of people in the world currently using neither Abi nor LyX is probably large enough that we don't have to worry about this for a while. So just because they use a lot of statistics, doesn't mean we have to either. Certainly, we ought to be tooting our own horn. But we should do it the way we want to. And actually, I didn't notice a focus on statistics. > Other stats that they like to list are numbers of emails, numbers of > lines of code changed or added. Shouldn't be too hard to generate big > numbers with Lars' current_view purge and so on. Frankly, I think number of emails is a silly stat. Same with lines changed. I mean, if you want to just once mention that Lars changed nK lines of code which proves how big the kernel rewrite is, that's fine. But I see no reason to do it often. > I couldn't figure out how to make a `ü' in > html so Jürgen missed out Hee hee. Darned foreigners can't just use regular letters like us educated folk. > News ideas: > + Personality Profiles > - like a mini interview or resume (wrt LyX) of a different > developer each fortnight -- starting with our illustrious leader Lars > (or maybe some comments from Matthias about why he started LyX). > Ideas? Each developers vision of where we're headed? Well, I'm worried that something like this might be a bit overambitious. Are you sure that (a) there are enough core developers that you'll be able to find one each fortnight? (b) Are you sure you (and they) will have time? I would suggest instead that *sometimes* you have one of the news items (what do you call the items that aren't tiny but aren't features - editorials?) be an interview/bio. No reason to promise certain things will happen in every issue. > + Statistics > - code count > - number of checkins per person > - number of emails on each list > - bugs fixed/created See above. I think some of these are silly. I find bugs fixed to be a neat thing in mozilla, but since we're not using bugzilla I think that'll be hard to track. Number of checkins is also rather meaningless. Again, I think this would be silly to have every time. Why not have a FUDD (Fortnightly Useless Developer Datum) in each issue. Things I think would be interesting on a one-time rather than fortnightly basis are: - number of people subscribing to each list (OK, maybe once per 6 months) - lines of code in LyX (Separated into C++, Perl, and other, of course :) - number of people in the CREDITS file - number of people who sent in patches in a given week (if it's large :) - number of pages of docs (OK, this requires someone latexing all of them - maybe number of K?) Even more Useless: - length of average post to lyx-devel, who's the most prolific (most posts) poster? Who's the most verbose poster (no contest there :)? - greatest number of insults on the list in 24 hours (e.g. a Friday) - number of beers drunk at the last LDM I'm sure you could come up with at least one thing to write each time. > + Major threads on the lists Great idea to steal! For example, if someone read that they might be drawn to a new area of development, or find an answer to a question they have, or something. But of course it's ok if this section is empty sometimes. > + Port info > - WinNT and Win98 > - OS/2 > - KDE/KLyX? Maybe the issue before or after the l10n/i18n issue could be about the "many flavors of LyX". You could also mention a bunch of unixes it's been on, and maybe even give some short hints on compiling issues, autoconf, etc. > + Aussie breakin? Why? > + Focus on a particular development area > - global variable purging (Lars and his current_view campaign) > - STL use I'd put these together. > - Mathed Where's Alejandro, btw? > - keymaps & i18n Or "non-English" in general, since you'd also mention l10n, non-english web sites, Unicode, etc. > - key bindings -- HOWTO - An interesting question. How much duplication do you want to do of things that are in the docs? Better to point to where to find things in the docs? A "LyX tip of the (Bi)Week" might not be a bad idea, though. Of course, if we had FAQ it might not be necessary. - docs > + Babylon 5 & Banzai Buckaroo hee hee > Okay that's about I can think of at present. I think that's plenty, don't you? -Amir
