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2:08 AM
@Jin, are you around? (I've collected some notes based on our prior discussions.)
 
2:23 AM
I've locked the TOC and the four sections of submissions. I left other haggadah-related posts open. (I was surprised to learn that locked questions disappear from the main page, though they're still there and can be reached via navigation.)
 
@MonicaCellio Yeah, that was an unwelcome surprise when we decided to make p-t-i-j questions locked at the end of the season last year, so we decided to close them instead.
 
@IsaacMoses I think after Jin has compiled the supplement I will go back, unlock, and close instead. It's frustrating that "edit lock, 'cause we're about to move this" has that side-effect.
Here is the final table of contents. 29 high-quality questions (including the intro and credits) -- nice job, everybody! This is going to be excellent!
2
A: Haggadah table of contents

msh210Table of Contents Introduction - What questions from the Passover Seder do people really want answers to? The Seder -          How can I make an engaging seder?          What do the haggadah section titles mean a...

 
 
1 hour later…
3:56 AM
@SethJ Thanks. :-)
@HodofHod 502 wouldn't normally be on the user's side AFAIK (but IANA... whatever).
 
@msh210 Not normally, no. In some fringe cases I think it can.
I think...
 
@HodofHod Okay.
 
> The 502 Bad Gateway error is usually a network error between servers on the Internet, meaning the problem isn't typically with your computer or Internet connection. However, it is possible that there's something wrong on your end and we'll work through those possibilities below.
In this case, since others weren't experiencing it, I figured it was me somehow.
 
@HodofHod Oh, thanks.
 
4:27 AM
@msh210 I downloaded the longest pessach.
Played it tonight, brought back memories. :)
 
@SethJ Thanks for reminding me, I have to listen to that again.
 
 
4 hours later…
8:19 AM
0
Q: How do I enter an RTL answer?

ArielHow do I tell the website that my text should be formatted RTL? I tried wrapping the answer in <DIV dir=rtl> but that got rid of all formatting in the answer - and didn't fix the problem. It's mainly a problem for the punctuation, making sure it's on the correct side of the text.

 
 
6 hours later…
2:22 PM
Good morning, @Jin!
 
Jin
@IsaacMoses morning
I'm reading the notes @MonicaCellio put together.
 
@Jin Great. This, too, I trust.
 
Jin
yep. looks like we got a lot of good content.
i'll start on a mockup today, and present you guys something tomorrow.
 
@Jin If you have any questions, I suggest that you come in here and ping a few people. We'll do our best to reply ASAP.
@Jin Yes, indeed. Thanks!
@Jin Great! I can't wait. Thanks so much.
 
Jin
one thing i'm not too clear about is, some questions are asked by multiple people? example
 
2:27 PM
Hi @Jin!
 
Jin
is it because they're duplicates on the main site, and you guys bundled them together?
 
@Jin That was a consolidation (for print purposes) of a few related (but distinct on-site) questions.
 
Jin
I see.
 
@Jin there were a couple cases where we consolidated multiple questions for the sake of the project, though they're valid as separate questions on the site.
@Jin fabulous! Thanks so much.
 
Jin
in the foot notes, we need to list the url for the actual question(s), no?
that way people can find them on the site later.
 
2:28 PM
@Jin yes, please. As you say, we want people to be able to go back to the originals.
 
@Jin, in this one, there was only one question, asked by me, but it started as a simpler question asked by my kid, so the print version effects two voices.
 
Jin
btw, the urls can be shortened, for example, judaism.stackexchange.com/u/2
 
@Jin I was just testing that. :-) yes, let's use the short ones if we can. Can we use mi.yodeya.com in them?
 
@Jin great. When compiling the submissions we tended to cut/paste URLs, which of course were judaism.SE rather than mi.yodeya, but I was hoping that for the publication we could consistently use the latter.
 
2:31 PM
@Jin either with the . or not :)
 
@IsaacMoses I think it's more legible with.
 
Jin
i can take care of the url part myself.
the mi.yodeya.com url is a lot shorter and elegant.
 
I figured that would be an easy search/replace. :-)
 
@Jin Given that in both cases (Q urls and U urls in the credits), the title/name is available in formatted text right there, I think it makes sense to use these bare short URLs ending in just the ID. That way, people won't think they have to type the title/name into their browser
 
By the way, there is presumably some licensing language that ought to go in here. Have other sites done publications? Is there boilerplate that you can use?
 
Jin
2:33 PM
for contributors section, we can write it as
Isaac Moses - mi.yodeya.com/u/2
Monica Cellio - mi.yodeya.com/u/472
etc
 
@Jin this
 
@Jin yes -- u/# and q/# for nice short typable URLs.
 
Jin
@MonicaCellio no other sites have done publications.
I'm not a lawyer :) but I feel we can use the same language as on the site?
 
@Jin "People of the Book" :)
 
Jin
cc wiki. etc
 
2:34 PM
@Jin wow. So is there somebody at SE we should ask about this? (Did I just do that?)
 
Jin
if you give me your exact question I can forward it to our community team.
 
@MonicaCellio Why do you think that the license text from the bottom of the site wouldn't suffice?
 
@IsaacMoses maybe that's fine. It occurred to me last night that the supplement should have some text about the license and that I'd given that zero thought until now.
 
I guess this would have to be adapted:
> site design / logo © 2013 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required
... perhaps just to remove the word "site" and include the URLs as text
@Jin @MonicaCellio "What licensing text should be included on our print publication? Does this ^^^ seem right?"
 
@Jin, the question is: what do we need to say in the publication about copyright and the CC license so that we ourselves aren't in violation of that license? Or what @IsaacMoses said. :-)
 
2:40 PM
@Jin I suppose there's a lot less motivation to fix SE content to dead trees, stripped of hyperlinks, without a context in which computers are temporarily forbidden.
 
Jin
2:52 PM
@MonicaCellio what Isaac said is fine. we're going to list urls to the questions and contributors. so that's attribution.
 
@Jin, it looks like the Fred situation has been resolved by merging. On the credits, please leave out /u/1417 (now a dead link anyway). (Or @MonicaCellio or @DoubleAA could do it to the source now by unlock/edit/lock)
 
@IsaacMoses Is that better?
 
@DoubleAA Yes, thanks. All set.
 
I didn't need to unlock even. I guess mods can edit locked posts.
 
@DoubleAA Oh. Right. Even better.
Wow. We managed to pick up no content by @HodofHod. Oh well. Next time.
 
2:58 PM
@IsaacMoses yeah, I was surprised when I was editing the contributor list. Bummer!
 
@MonicaCellio, I'm not 100% satisfied with my rewrite of the last sentence of the credits, since it doesn't explicitly thank Jin and Sean as people. If you can edit it to something better, I'd appreciate it.
 
Jin
3:19 PM
@MonicaCellio @IsaacMoses btw, I looked over some of the questions. didn't we agree that ideally, it'd be nice if one question(and its answers) to be fit on one single page?
some of these are a bit too long, may run into a 2nd page
 
@Jin I was wondering if this would be a problem. How many, and how much over? We could solve this by having a format that allows for spillover and/or by editing them down for length. If the latter, could you provide a max word count?
... also, is there a possibility of combining multiple Q&As under the same heading onto the same page[s]? In that case, it might work out that a 1.25-pager could follow a .75-pager to make a total of two pages.
 
Jin
@IsaacMoses well, it is not a big deal if the question is long enough to fill 2 pages nicely(with footnotes section). it may look a big less visually pleasing if the 2nd page ends up having a short paragraph. then you're left with all the white space.
 
@Jin ... Also, within the "Magid" section, it could work to have the subsections not start new pages, but be set off less strongly.
@Jin I guess I'd suggest that you do the best you can with design, then give it to us with "here are the places where your content length makes the design look awkward," let us try to edit them down, then regen with the shorter content. Would that work?
 
If there's a ToC (with page numbers), I see no reason we can't start every question [edit: and each section] after the preceding one (same page, but visually-clearly a new question). @IsaacMoses @Jin
 
@Jin ... or even, without doing all the plugging-in, create a design template, and derive from that approximate wordcount ranges that will lead to awkwardness (e.g. 105% - 125% of a typical page wordcount) and give those ranges to us, and we can go through the submissions, check which are in that range, and try to edit them into compliance.
@msh210 Or that. The question is whether to start a new page for each section (many of which have only one question).
 
Jin
3:33 PM
I think what I'll do is, I'll create a template(most likely a Word doc), set up the frontpage design, and a layout. That way I an hand it off to you guys for the actual text editing. It may be too time consuming for me to do the actual editing(I may get it wrong).
and when you're done, you can export it to a pdf with 2 different paper size(letter and A4)
 
@Jin Okay. Thanks.
 
@Jin @IsaacMoses - initially I was thinking that most questions could fit on a single page. Now that we've generated them I can see that some are longer, and I think necessarily so. If we can work with that anyway, without making the book ugly, I'd like to try to keep the content we have. Not starting questions in the same section on a new page would help.
 
All right, which Mi Yodeya contributors do not have a home to clean for Pesach?
 
@msh210 or that.
 
@msh210 <sigh> me. Doesn't mean I'm not busy, though. OTOH, I do want to help.
... hopefully, the requisite copy/paste job won't be more than a couple of hours' work, once the redactor gets into a groove </optimistic>
 
Jin
3:41 PM
I was thinking the intro page, typically come after the cover page design, and before the TOC, should be an one pager. this seems a bit too long
 
@Jin do you have a sense of by about how much it's too long? (Do we need to trim 10%, 50%, something in between?)
 
@Jin Finally, someone willing to agree with me that it needs editing! (agree re 1-page, BTW)
 
Jin
Also, I don't think the intro needs to be in the form of Q+A either.
 
@Jin This, from an SE employee? :)
 
Jin
haha. I'm just speaking from the POV of a reader, of any publications. I prefer the intro to be short and concise, then I can get to the meaty part.
I think the intro could just start where it says "Mi Yodeya (whose name comes from the "Who Knows One?" song mentioned above) is the Jewish corner of a wonderful network of Q&A sites called Stack Exchange. "...
then also mention the rest of the printout are selected Q&As from the site.
but I'll use the current drafted text to start the design, and see how it goes.
 
3:49 PM
@Jin I appreciate that. Given the time constraint, I think we mostly have to trust the process that @MonicaCellio sealed last night wrt to content and concentrate on format now, including editing for format's sake when necessary.
 
Jin
sure. i'll work on the draft today and provide you guys with the .doc tomorrow AM
 
... the intro is definitely long-winded. I was trying to do a bunch of different things (Q&A for motivation, intro SE, intro MY, intro this pub, explain diversity of styles, "this is not your rabbi", invite to participate on MY, ask for feedback), some parts of some of which could probably be reduced or removed
 
@Jin Er, I just edited it, and plan to revert when 5 minutes are up. So don't grab it this second. :-)
 
@msh210 if it makes things easier feel free to unlock anything I locked.
 
Jin
3:56 PM
@IsaacMoses since this print out may be read by people who have never heard of Mi Yodeya, I feel it needs to be pretty clear in the intro right away, what Mi Yodeya is. then elaborate from there. Now I think of it, we did have some printed material for other sites, but just as a one-page flyer.
let me dig it up..
that's the flyer we did for English.se, passed around on various school campuses.
 
@Jin Thanks very much. I can try to do the first pass of copy/paste in the early-ish evening tomorrow. If someone else can proofread and then publish to .pdfs later that night or the next day, then we stand a chance of getting it up live before the US goes to bed on Thursday. Perhaps in parallel with that, someone needs to make a landing page, and we need to get the pretty URL up.
 
Jin
it's much briefer compared to the material we're working on now of course. But I feel the intro is very clear, within seconds I know what English.se is.
 
@Jin Can SE host the .pdf files? If so, to whom would we email them?
 
Jin
@IsaacMoses I believe we can host it, or use a dropbox folder.
 
@msh210 Okay, I've reverted, @Jin.
 
3:59 PM
@msh210 is this still relevant? (trying to figure out what I'm looking at)
 
... getting it live by early evening Thursday would allow for outreach to start on Thursday night
 
@MonicaCellio No, never mind.
 
4:17 PM
@IsaacMoses That is, unless someone else wants to do the first pass then or earlier! I promise, you don't need to watch behind you for daggers on this ramp.
@MonicaCellio @msh210 @DoubleAA, I think it doesn't matter too much what the pretty URL is, so much as that it is finalized by tomorrow night and working by COB Thursday. I'd suggest just picking something and asking SE dev to do it now.
0
Q: Mi Yodeya Hagada landing page

Isaac Moses This will be the landing page for the Mi Yodeya Hagada, and it could eventually be edited to be the landing page for future publications, B"H. A special pretty URL will point here.

^^^ Pretty URL can point here permanently. We can edit it when we're ready to have actual content.
 
4:38 PM
@IsaacMoses Jin was our contact for that. @Jin, do you think the /publications (or whatever) URL could point to meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/q/1568/2 please?
 
Jin
@msh210 sure. i'll let our dev know. what /urlname/ would you prefer?
 
@Jin I don't think we decided. Someone mentioned /special, someone mentioned /publications, /pubs sounds good, I think there were some other options on the table. If you want to go with whatever I personally decide right now: /publications
 
Jin
/publications definitely serves the purpose for now.
we can always create more alisas for different type of things.
 
@Jin Okay. Thanks.
 
@Jin sounds good. Thanks all.
 
4:57 PM
1
Q: Mi Yodeya Hagada landing page

Isaac MosesPLACEHOLDER: Content to be added This will be the landing page for the Mi Yodeya Hagada, and it could eventually be edited to be the landing page for future publications, B"H. A special pretty URL will point here.

 
@Jin Would it be possible to also provide (or maybe you meant this already) a sample with one real Q&A pasted in and sample .pdf exports? That way, we have a gold standard to compare against when we do our work.
 
Jin
@IsaacMoses yes.
 
@Jin Thanks!
 
 
1 hour later…
Jin
6:07 PM
@IsaacMoses @MonicaCellio @msh210 I talked to the dev, they proposed using SE's current URL shortener service, so the url redirect will be: s.tk/miyodeya
it will redirect to an all purpose meta post you have set up
 
@IsaacMoses @Monica Yeah, I was surprised too. I have a some content in general pesach stuff, but nothing that would fit in a haggadah I think.
 
@Jin cool! I didn't know SE already had a standard shortener. That looks good. It can point to this: meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/1568/…
 
Jin
great. that way, having "miyodeya" as the shortener name, it can cover all types of events.
 
@HodofHod I did a (very late and cursory) scan of your answers when I noticed the problem. Nothing jumped out but I still feel bad (I could have missed a good candidate).
@Jin yup!
 
@Jin Sounds good; thanks.
yesterday, by Isaac Moses
@SethJ לשנה הבאה, בספר כרוך There'll be plenty of room for whatever we left out this year, plus ten pages of the Mi Yodeya song.
@HodofHod ... Don't wait until the last minute, though. To make a polished book, we're going to have to get started many months ahead of time.
 
6:50 PM
1
Q: Future home of: Hagada - Mi Yodeya?

Isaac MosesAt some point later this week, hopefully on Thursday evening, March 21, we will be very excited to present Mi Yodeya's first publication for print: Hagada - Mi Yodeya? Real questions and answers that spring from the Passover Seder This hagada supplement contains a collection of select que...

^^^ Yodeyans, this is happening in a couple of days, but not long before Pesach. Please get your sharing muscles ready.
Thanks, @MonicaCellio
 
@IsaacMoses thanks for preparing it!
I am really looking forward to this!
 
7:06 PM
@MonicaCellio To quote Inigo Montoya, "I hate waiting."
 
@IsaacMoses but just think of how excellent it will be when we get there. (Hmm, kind of like y'mei moshiach? :-) )
 
@MonicaCellio :)
 
@IsaacMoses still working on that of course, but I did find several of the answers helpful.
 
@MonicaCellio As soon as you've perfected that emotion, you'll hear an Earth-shaking shofar blast and think "Already?! I was just getting good at yearning!"
 
@IsaacMoses I suspect that if that happens correctly, that wouldn't be my reaction. :-)
 
7:15 PM
@MonicaCellio, one more request: Would you care to de-featured the proposal at this point?
 
@IsaacMoses good catch. Done.
 
@MonicaCellio Thanks
 
@SethJ I have a similar (I guess) volume from Mossad Harav Kook. Not as thick, but with larger pages, I think.
 
@SethJ Competition.
 
@msh210 I'll bet we have more commentators.
@IsaacMoses ... this: nehora.com/products/…
 
Mi Yodeya: "We are currently offline for maintenance / This Stack Exchange site is temporarily offline, routine maintenance usually takes less than an hour."
 
@msh210 for me, too, FWIW
 
8:02 PM
I hope EL&U doesn't use the same message.
 
@msh210 Seems over now.
 
English Language and Usage: "We are currently offline for maintenance. / This Stack Exchange site is temporarily offline; routine maintenance usually takes less than an hour."
@IsaacMoses Yep.
 
8:19 PM
@msh210 Ha!
@msh210 I got it, too, briefly.
@msh210 I figured it was SE's Fail Whale.
 
 
3 hours later…
Jin
11:48 PM
s.tk/miyodeya redirect is now operational!
 
@Jin Awesome!
 

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