Stack Exchange Community Blogs - 2012-06-13

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3:59 PM

@RebeccaChernoff @gracenote Thanks for the info! We're very much looking forward to the blog, and new topic suggestions keep coming in. Let's strike the iron while it's hot, as they say (i.e. ride the initial excitement wave). I was thinking of starting with a very conservative initial posting frequency of 1/month, and gradually increase it if it becomes clear that we can sustain a faster pace. Currently we have 14 concrete suggestions (from volunteers) for post topics (some for series of posts).

@Szabolcs don't worry, once it actually comes time to write the posts, they'll start vanishing :-(

@Szabolcs but it sounds like you should be able to do 1/mo without trouble

@derobert That's why I thought of keeping it at 1/month at first. If only 1/3 of those suggested posts get written, it's still enough for half a year.

These posts should be written because people want to write them, not because "we need more posts, can you please finish it by next week?"

Sometimes you get a great idea, and feel like writing it up right away. If this happens, we can put the post away for a while, polish it later, and post it according to schedule, the following month. If the post queue gets filled up faster than it's emptied, we can increase the post frequency. At least that's my personal naive idea :-)

Yes, and it was ours too (I help run the cooking.SE blog)... It turns out to take a lot of time to write up posts. At least ours do. And so does editing, etc. We're still hoping to have a queue, someday!

Of course, we're doing twice a month

I'm looking at your blog now. I really hope there would be a way to change the date format, I found it so confusing ... !!

I thought you didn't have a post for two months (06-04 and 06-06)

@Szabolcs hmmm, good question, let me look if there is.

@Szabolcs you'll be happy to know, there is a setting. It's set to Y-m-d (e.g., 2012-06-13). So, umm, yeah, that works well :-(

4:13 PM

I like the self-explanatory ISO format ;-) 2012-06-13. But now I have to admit that this is the usual order in my language. Your bread experiment is interesting. It was more work than just writing it up!

@Szabolcs yes, most of our posts so far have required a bit of work besides writing it up. I guess all of them really, though the work for the cookbook review wasn't done specifically for the post

I have no idea how much work articles for your blog will take compared to ours. You probably won't have photography to deal with, for one thing.

We have some users who tend to write very long answers that could be posted as a blog post on their own if they didn't need the context of the question. Also, we managed to automate graphics uploading, which made the site more colourful than most.

It does take quite a bit of time to write these answers though.

Here's a looong one, which is more like a full extension package with the implementation explained rather than an asnwer.

Hmmm, more blog admins need to hang out here, to offer advice & experience.

@derobert Yes, I think that would be very useful. I'm really glad that you're here as you already have experience with starting a new blog.

@Szabolcs wow, that looks like something that could be a blog post (though, I confess, I haven't read it. Just scrolled through it.)

When you post it as a blog post, you get much wider attention than as an answer, I think. Though of course, cooking probably draws more random people than Mathematica will. But as a downside, you don't get any rep.

Rebecca Chernoff

4:28 PM

@Szabolcs hmm, have you still not heard anything?

Here's another one which is really a full tutorial, though not sure if the topic is great for a blog. The style this user writes in is very easy to follow and the explanations are complete. It's more blog-like than answer-like.

Hmm. The problem must be that your blog request wasn't starred. Fixed :-P

@Szabolcs by the way, even before the blog is created, I'd suggest you get people started on writing posts. It took us a long time after our blog was created to actually put content on it, and that was rather silly

@RebeccaChernoff Not yet. Do we need to do anything special before we can get the blog? We do have lots of topic suggestions, but as derobert said, I'm not sure the post themselves will come as quickly as the suggestions :-)

@Szabolcs just have them write it in LibreOffice or whatever. The blog doesn't use markdown.

@derobert Thanks for the start and the idea. I'll make sure to mention it to everyone.

Rebecca Chernoff

4:33 PM

@derobert yes it does.

@RebeccaChernoff it has a GUI editor, and when you turn that off, HTML

Rebecca Chernoff

you can put markdown in the html editor

@RebeccaChernoff Does it have file hosting (for files < 1 MB)?

Rebecca Chernoff

When we started, I installed a plugin to make sure markdown is supported.

@Szabolcs for images at least, haven't tried anything else

4:34 PM

It would be useful to attach Mathematica notebooks to some posts.

@RebeccaChernoff Ah. Ok. Wasn't aware you could plop Markdown into the HTML editor.

Hmmm. It rejected a .txt file upload "for security reasons". So I doubt it'll take Mathematica files.

Well, Mathematica files usually contain programs, so I'm not surprised.

Well, it wouldn't take a plain text file, so I'm guessing it'll only take .png .jpg .gif, etc.

@RebeccaChernoff And apart from notebook attachments, would it be possible to have CDF files embedded in blog posts? CDF files are Mathematica notebooks with some interactive functionality that can be embedded in webpages. There's a WordPress plugin for it. The Wolram Demonstrations Project uses them too. Typically there would be a static placeholder image with a link for those who don't have the CDF plugin. Those who do could try the interactive example.

People have asked for this in the Mma chatroom.

I must go now (have a lecture to give), but I'll put a link to this discussion in the Mma chatroom

@Szabolcs I will get this looked into - is there a post on your Meta that wraps this in a neat package or is it mostly in your chatroom?

4:41 PM

23

Q: A blog for Mathematica.SE -- volunteers / suggestions for post topics?

Note: There seems to be a lot of support for having our own blog, and we have several volunteers, so I've added the feature-request tag to this post to draw the attention of the SE team and hopefully set up a blog. Update: Here's some info on creating/requesting a blog. Several StackExchan...

discussion feature-request blog

Here you go :-)

Rebecca Chernoff

@Szabolcs this will be something for Grace to handle. if/should/once/etc you get a blog, a meta post asking for the feature request would be appropriate.

@Szabolcs I meant the CDF thing specifically - which is touched on in a comment but otherwise not made distinct

@GraceNote No, I think it was in chat. We'll start a new post about it if necessary.

@GraceNote Most post suggestions so far don't really need this feature. Yes, you're right, it's better to have a clear discussion about it.

I really need to run or I'll be late from my own lecture! Thanks for looking into it!

No problem!

5:02 PM

For when you get back: we're going to go ahead and give you the greenlight for getting a blog, @Szabolcs

@GraceNote Thanks! (I've been reading the transcript.)

@rcollyer You're welcome, hehe

What is the time frame for getting that set up? Also, are there tutorials for publishing on the blog?

I have to run a couple meetings today so it'll be some time before I can get on it.

I figured it would be on the order of a week, so the next couple of days is definitely exceeding my expectations. :)

2 hours later…

6:47 PM

@rcollyer Its Wordpress, so you can find tutorials on that on teh interwebs, I suspect. Its not that difficult, thankfully.

Or, I think there is even a wordpress SE.

@derobert That makes that easy. Thanks.

7:47 PM

@Szabolcs I put in a bug about the date format

0

Q: Wrong date format on Blog Overflow

If you look at the Seasoned Advice blog main page, each article shows a date: However, the administrative interface is set to use ISO dates: The US-specific format is confusing, as Europeans write day-month-year instead of month-day-year. It has confused at least Szabolcs. Unfortunately, it...

2 hours later…

Rebecca Chernoff

9:31 PM

[status-completed]

@RebeccaChernoff yes, we found a way to make you work on blog overflow again :-P

Rebecca Chernoff

hehe, well coding goes to devs, @GraceNote is handling the community side of things.

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