This room is intended for discussion about the blog by anyone contributing to the blog. This should give us a 'space' to discuss topics to post, make suggestions on existing posts and so on.
Next week is the 'first birthday' for TeX.sx. That seems to be something we should blog about. Who wants to take that? I guess that as I've been on the site since day 1 (and have visited every day, despite what the login system thinks!) it's probably me.
Suggestions for particular areas to focus on would be most welcome, although of course if someone else wants to take the blog post for the first birthday, they are welcome to!
I was thinking of doing a piece about packages created from answers/inspired by questions on here. I believe minted was written in response to a stackoverflow question. I think one of @MartinScharrer 's packages started as an answer here, didn't it? (collectbox?) Then of course there's "from answers to packages" as welll...
Any other instances of this interesting phenomenon?
In writing error messages and warnings for a package/class, I find it a pain to manually insert \MessageBreaks so that words don't get cruelly bisected because of TeX's max_print_line value (which typically is set to 79). In some cases it's not possible to predict where the \MessageBreak should ...
So @JosephWright is writing something for the birthday date itself? I'll have something ready soon after that can be scheduled for a later date. @PauloCereda also has something in preparation? Looks like we are up and running!
Looking back, what really convinced you to begin writing with TeX or LaTeX?
This question is "community wiki", so there's no reputation to lose or to gain.
Please don't write advantages of TeX and LaTeX or any pros and cons.
I hope to read about something like
a drastic experience that led y...
I don't seem to be able to see others' draft posts (though I can see their titles). I'd be happy to look through for typos, but at the moment I can't. It's fine if it isn't desirable for mere "authors" to see others' drafts, but I just thought I'd raise the issue so that it can be shot down in flames if that is the general consensus.
@AndrewStacey I don't see any problems on seeing other authors' drafts. In fact, I need proofreading, as (a) I'm a non native english speaker, so my texts are a paradise of errors, and (b) the content might sound offtopic or flaming.
For the next week, as it's TeX.sx birthday week, along with the birthday post, what about an interview with a known TeX hacker? Could be one of the devs from the LaTeX3 project: Frank Mittelbach, Denys Duchier, Chris Rowley, Rainer Schöpf, Johannes Braams, Michael Downes, David Carlisle, Alan Jeffrey, Morten Høgholm, Thomas Lotze, Javier Bezos, Will Robertson or even our good friend Joseph Wright.
@PauloCereda How about this: "Andrew Stacey is a British mathematician currently residing in Norway. He uses LaTeX for everything from mathematical articles to his children's birthday invitations."
I once wrote an article about an adaptive http server. It could adapt the hosted pages according to certain replacement rules and the generated traffic. Needless to say I did that for two reasons: (1) I'm too lazy to update stuff on webpages, and (2) I was curious about a model to do such thing. The first reason is the strongest one, of course. =P
Until recently, you had to edit the LaTeX3 Project pages by hand in an SVN repo, then copy them across. We moved to a system called Ophelia (thomas-lotze.de/software/ophelia), but I don't know how to access it :-(
For some reason, I never had the correct privileges to do any editing under the old system: no idea if I do now!
Back to 'on topic': what sort of 'interview' do we want, and who should I ask?
@PauloCereda What sort of feedback do you want on your article? As it's quite a personal view, I'm reluctant to make any edits myself.
@PauloCereda I think at this stage we are learning what is 'on topic'
One general thing (to everyone): I think as we are TeX users we should use 'real' quote marks rather than "/' (real quotes can be accessed from the Omega icon in the editor)
(As I'm from the UK, I use single quotes, but I guess most other people will use double ones)
We also need some categories. I added TeX.sx as on for posts about the site itself, but is that too general? I see that the main SO blog has things like 'announcements', but am not sure that fits. @PauloCereda's post might come under 'advocacy', 'LaTeX', 'new-users' or something else: suggestions?
@PauloCereda I was about half-way through myself :-) I've got some stuff to do, so I'll wait 'till you finish editing and come back to do some proof-reading.
@PauloCereda Just been looking at the various wordpress plugins. There do appear to be a few that would allow other authors to view posts, but I don't know enough about the machinery to recommend a particular one. I think it would be useful to be able to do this as it would make the blog more of a community affair and less just a bunch of individuals who happen to be lumped together.
@JosephWright Oh sorry, I got no notification of a parallel editing, my bad. :-) I'll just add Stefan's suggestion of referencing Most significant reasons that led us to (La)TeX CW in the post.
@AndrewStacey I see. I guess this is the model WordPress came up with for the difference between an 'author' and an 'editor'. What I suppose we want is 'author who can see but not edit other posts'
@PauloCereda I'm yet to find a good plugin for this, at least in my limited testing so far
@PauloCereda I've made a few 'copy edits'. Hopefully I've not changed the sense of the text anywhere, but have tried to make it flow a little better in English. I've also used -- rather than - for parenthetic statements: Bringhurst recommends -- over --- for this, so I hope people like it!
@JosephWright Thanks a lot, I trust you. =) It's still tricky for me to come up with correct phrasal constructs in English, since Portuguese has a different flow and style.
@RebeccaChernoff I think that what @AndrewStacey suggests is using something like the 'Role Scoper' plugin. From the blurb, that would allow us to give authors read-only permission on other unpublished material.
@PauloCereda Well, I've promised a post for our 'birthday', and I think there are already one or two more lining up after that. So perhaps tomorrow or Saturday?
Do we want to 'shape' the release dates? There is no reason not to publish Paulo's post now, unless we want to try to keep up a 'tempo' as I suggested earlier
@JosephWright I guess so. Though we could think of the 'tempo' you suggested (I was trying to find your original comment on this, but I couldn't remember the word).
@PauloCereda I did not suggest anything in particular, it was more that I'm aware that we may have several posts close together then a gap. I think the original pitch was one post a week, which we'll certainly exceed to start with.
Perhaps give it a day to let @StefanKottwitz and @MartinScharrer take a look at the draft (they should both be able to see it)
@PauloCereda It would be nice to have one by someone other than me sooner rather than later! I suggest we publish yours tomorrow, then I'll do the 'birthday' one on Tuesday, then we can get some sort of system going.
For the room in general - the idea of tags in a blog is that they are 'spontaneous' categories. We'll probably have a bit of shuffling between tags and categories as posts accumulate
I guess similar to tags on the main site, really ...
Looking back, what really convinced you to begin writing with TeX or LaTeX?
This question is "community wiki", so there's no reputation to lose or to gain.
Please don't write advantages of TeX and LaTeX or any pros and cons.
I hope to read about something like
a drastic experience that led y...
