[NCUC E-team] blog post for NCUC

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Jul 18 07:41, William Drake (william.drake at uzh.ch) wrote:

> Thanks McTim. I got tied up yesterday but was going to suggest a
> small tweak to your draft, as I thought the first sentence could be
> misconstrued a little as making NCUC more central to APC's event
> than is merited. But no biggie. Thanks for doing it.

Note that there's no technical reason it couldn't still be edited,
perhaps taking into account overlap with Joy's entry (which Tim hadn't
noticed when he posted his).

> *I vaguely recall us discussing but not the resolution—we don't want
> to have Blog in the menu bar?

I think we do. Whether it should be labeled "blog" or "archive"
or what is debatable, but a distinct menu item would be useful.

A visible "login" button would also be useful, encouraging
people to ask for accounts.

> Going forward, to the extent that blogs are
> written by different people and might present views or issues that
> are not so much "news," I'd think this is sort of mislabeling.

We could filter out a limited set of blog entries there if
desired (e.g., explicitly tagging news items when blogging
or limiting to select people or something).

> But if our web design gurus think this is sufficient ok, my
> intuitive expectations may not be in synch with common practice…

I'm afraid we don't have many (any?) web design gurus active
among us, rather just us tech folks at the moment.

> *So what's our policy on the blog? All members will be given login
> ins (please remind me of) and then…who can blog? Any approval
> process?

No decision yet on that either. For now people who want to blog
will have to ask for login (though I've added some proactively).
Later we may add logins to all members automatically, then I'd
suggest using "contributor" as default status so some of the
old hands would have to approve entries of newcomers until
they've proven real (I'm mainly concerned that unused logins
are likely to fall into spammers' hands).

> *99% of our members are not in Durban, and while the prospect of a
> new website has been mentioned on ncuc-discuss, it's actual arrival
> hasn't been announced. Would someone centrally involved in it care
> to send a couple paragraphs to the list and say something about its
> features, take a bow, etc?

Right. Will do.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen