Not Quite Dead Yet

by Chris Coleman and Mikel King

<Chris> As any enthusiast knows, your hobbies are the first to get cut when your time gets short. It doesn't matter how much you enjoy them, life has a way of sneaking in and making it impossible, or at least it seems so at the time. Fortunately, life moves on.

Daemon News is a community driven site. If nobody volunteers, nothing gets done. So when Mikel King approached me about what had happened to DN Ezine, I said "Its just waiting for someone to step up and take charge". So Mikel did and those of us still lurking on the DN internal mailing lists have been helping as time permits.

Once we got underway we decided to see how hard it was going to be to get back into a regular publishing cycle before we started pushing people very hard for articles. We also started making long overdue improvements to the way articles were published.

• We updated our article management back end and removed all of the steps that required special access. This removed a huge bottleneck in the publishing process. Before this change, an article couldn't be published if the right person was on vacation.
• We moved to a more flexible publishing schedule. Now, articles are published as they are finished. Instead of waiting and publishing an issueas a whole, we can publish articles as they finish winding their way through the editing process. They are still grouped by monthly issues as before, but this relieves a lot of the stress on the editorial team. It also keeps articles from getting stale before we get a chance to publish them.
• While we are on the topic of new stuff, I updated the RSS feed on BSDNews.com. I added article descriptions for sites that use it. I also added link into the headers, so it will show up in the URL bar in most browsers. I have also created an RSS feed for daemonnews.org.
• We also did the same modifications to the RSS on the Support Forums.

In addition to Mikel, we opened up the volunteer list and added several new Contributing Editors to the DN Staff. If you missed the open invitation and still really really want to help out, drop me an e-mail. I think we still have room.

All these changes mean that the site will work better and require less work. However, it doesn't change the primary goal of the site: Publish great BSD articles. For that we need you. Take notes on what you are working on and send them in. If you are working on it, chances are someone else would benefit from your experiences.

<Mikel> Well I think Chris is being overly modest as he has done most of the behind the scenes work on installing the system enhancements, while I have worked on attracting updated content. As we have learned, it is an uphill battle to balance one's work life with one's private life and these Open Source Projects. As Chris so aptly stated in his opening remarks, a team approach is essential for us to achieve the goals we've set forth.

First, let me thank those that have come forth to volunteer in this effort. DN is a special kind of open source project, one that I feel is absolutely essential to the success of other open source projects. No, we do not necessarily hack code or develop those handy little utilities that you keep in your admin belt awaiting the next end-user emergency. But we do let you know about them, we try to evaluate them and demonstrate how to get them up and running.

Together, our editorial staff provides resources to the BSD community that enable it to flourish and grow to meet the demands of the future. Where else can people turn to learn about developments in their favorite BSD projects? Where else can you turn to discover exciting new technologies? It is my sincerest hope that when you think of Daemons News you think of technology news and reviews that you can use.

However the only way we can achieve that goal is to continue to have the dedication and support of the entire BSD community. We rely on the good work of many volunteers who offer their precious spare time to help us achieve the results that we do. At this point, our team is small; however, with a handful of dedicated volunteers we could greatly improve the publication's original content ratio.

It's not difficult to draft an outline for an article and hand it to one of our editors who will assist you in polishing up the rough edges. Maybe you are a sysadmin who has written a good how-to that needs a bit of spell and grammar checking. Bring it here and we'll spruce it up, throw a fresh coat of paint on it, and help you transform it in to a quality article.

Another area would be BUG meeting notes, audio, video and transcripts. If you are hosting a major BSD Users Group meeting, we would like to have one of your volunteers transcribe the meeting. If you have accompanying audio then we would like to start podcasting from Daemon News as well. Having the transcripts to read along with the audio, as well as making the audio content indexable, is a valuable tool for our entire community.

As you can see, becoming an author for DN is not an arduous task, there are people on staff here who will assist you with guidance and even co-authorship should you like. The biggest stumbling block in writing is determining exactly what you wish to write about. The hardest and often most misunderstood aspect of writing is maintaining focus. Let's take an article about an application for example; many people feel that you need to cover every option and mode an application has. Yet in reality what you need to do is write about a specific subset of options, ones that you feel most people would use. Then limit the focus of your article around those, while trying to generate as much interest in the app as possible.

Ultimately, this is a community supported project; Daemon News will always reflect what the community has put into it. Currently, there are eight rich years of contributions under the hood of this zine, and with your support we can achieve at least another eight. By becoming involved you will contribute something back to the BSD community as well as help shape the future of Daemon News.