WANTED: New Editor(s) for TiddlyWiki Newsletter

Announcements
#1

Would you be interested in helping to compile the TiddlyWiki Newsletter?

A couple of years ago we started a TiddlyWiki Newsletter on Substack. The announcement post has more details. The basic idea was to pick out the interesting and relevant new developments and discussions for TiddlyWiki users who don’t have the time to follow all the discussions here.

The Newsletter has done quite well: we have 1,300 subscribers, and have had some good feedback from readers. A volunteer from the community kindly edited the newsletter until a year ago at which point they reluctantly had to step aside for personal reasons. I’ve been meaning for some time to find a replacement.

We are looking for people who:

  • Are familiar with TiddlyWIki
  • Are good at writing, and understand how to write good headlines and summaries
  • Can spare the time to commit to a publication schedule. I don’t have a fixed view of whether the newsletter should be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly but I think it is important to try to stick to a regular schedule

The past newsletters can be seen at https://tiddlywiki.substack.com/.

I appreciate that this might be a significant commitment. I wonder whether it might be beneficial for two (or more) people to work together on it. The Substack editor is pretty good, and seems to support edits by different people at the same time.

If you have any questions please reply here, or feel free to reach out directly to me.

5 Likes
#2

I am sorry that there have not been any responses since I posted this last month.

It feels like a missed opportunity. We have a steady stream of people subscribing to the newsletter, apparently eager for news about our community. The subscriber numbers are decent:

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I do understand that it is hard to take on another commitment when we might all be feeling overstretched, but how can there possibly be so many people who have the time and energy to post here, and yet nobody who can spare the time to share their joy in TiddlyWiki with 1,500 interested readers.

The qualifications are simple: we’re looking for people interested and knowledgeable in TiddlyWiki and able to write comfortably in English. It could be a solo individual, or perhaps one or two people who work together on it. Substack makes the writing process as easy as possible, and there are endless inspiring statistics to track as your work reaches readers.

We’re having fun here, so what could be more satisfying than sharing it with new people?

#3

Fair question and I agree 100%. Bloody shameful, actually.

I fall into the mentioned category: I fear I will be overstretched by taking this on (which otherwise I would leap on). I am so snowed under at work, spare minutes are thin on the ground. So, what about…

I’ll make a start on the understanding that:

  1. Others will pick up wherever I might drop the ball.
  2. I understand what is being expected of me AND understand what is being presented (TiddlyWiki is so broad a subject, there’s a lot to know and a lot that I don’t know anything about).

If I can oversee in the traditional editor-role sense, then I’m sure I can help. I also suffer from an addiction to proofreading (not so much here as the forum is informal).

Thoughts @jeremyruston ?

#4

Great question! My participation here is sporadic and driven by my leisure flexibility, while anything like a commitment (with deadlines?!) might run up against my real paid dayjob.

I do love editing, and I do love TiddlyWiki.

I wonder if there’s some kind of collaborative platform where the work of wrangling newsletter stuff could be picked up on a good-faith as-available basis. Then we could have a sub-group here of folks who can communicate about what needs doing, what’s been done, who’s leaving on a 6-week off-grid trip, what task someone might have gotten stumped on, etc.

3 Likes
#5

Thank you @CodaCoder @Springer.

I think that it makes a lot of sense to organise this around a small team of contributors. Counting me, that would be three of us so far.

With more than one person writing I think it would be helpful to agree a house style, and perhaps draw up some checklists to help guide editors decide whether an item is worth including, and how to write the introductory text. That material can live on tiddlywiki.com, and we can add a link to the newsletter tiddler asking for contributors.

At its simplest, compiling the newsletter should just be a matter of rolling through the threads here on Talk, and considering whether any of the announcement posts would be worth including in the newsletter. I think that would be things like new releases of TiddlyWiki/TiddlyDesktop etc, new plugins, updates to important plugins, and showcases of interesting TiddlyWiki’s in the wild. Sometimes a discussion thread itself might be worth including.

Items would be a 30-70 word introduction with a link, and optionally an image (the newsletter looks much more inviting with some images included).

In terms of the platform, if we continue to use Substack for the newsletter then we might be best off collaborating via their web editor. It’s fairly slick, and would have the advantage that we’d be seeing the content in the same way as the reader. The only requirement is that the contributors would have to have Substack accounts.

With that clarified position, I’d welcome any other volunteers to be contributors.

#6

Done. Though, only very recently. Will we communicate on Substack, or… ?

#7

I’ve updated tiddlywiki.com with a new tiddler “Tiddlywiki Newsletter Team” that is an attempt to flesh out a style guide for contributing. I’ve quoted the current text below for the record but would welcome improvements.

One area is that I’d like to quote some solid advice about writing headlines and opening paragraphs. I’ve seen such things before where newspaper editors point out the importance of putting the right word at the start of the headline and so on.

I think there’s a lot to be said for keeping our communication in the open, to make it more inviting for others to join in. For the moment we can continue using this thread.

If you and @Springer could let me know the email address you are using on Substack I’ll add you both as co-admins.

Full text of "TiddlyWiki Newsletter Team"

The TiddlyWiki Newsletter is produced by a small team of volunteers. We would love to have your help if you want to get involved.

Team

The newsletter team currently consists of:

Audience

The newsletter is intended for TiddlyWiki end users who do not track all the discussions on https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/.

Coverage of developer topics such as JavaScript and intricate wikitext should be handled thoughtfully to avoid alienating the core audience of end users.

Subscribing to the newsletter should give people confidence that they will not miss any important developments.

Process

The process is:

  1. Determine which discussion forum threads should be included
  2. Decide whether to link to the thread itself or to link to the subject of the thread
  3. Write a 30-70 word introduction
  4. Optionally, choose or make an image/screenshot to illustrate the story

These steps are described in more detail below.

Criteria for Inclusion

The criteria for inclusion are necessarily loose. Editorial judgement is required to decide whether an item is sufficiently interesting to a broad enough audience.

Important categories of threads that should be considered:

  • All announcements of new releases of TiddlyWiki and TiddlyDesktop
  • Community news and developments
  • New plugins
  • Updates to widely used plugins
  • Showcases of interesting TiddlyWiki’s in the wild

Linking

In most cases, news items should link to the opening post in the corresponding thread. There might be situations where it makes more sense to link to the item concerned which will be listed here.

Writing News Items

Items would be a 30-70 word introduction with a link, and optionally an image (the newsletter looks much more inviting with some images included).

Images

Well chosen images can be informative and add visual interest to the newsletter as a whole. Some points to consider when choosing an image:

  • Images that work best of all are those that trigger an emotional response by including a human face. It is fairly unlikely that a TiddlyWiki news story would have a reason to be illustrated by a picture of a smiling baby, but we should strive to do so if we can
  • If using a screenshot, remember that the image will be displayed fairly small in the newsletter so it is better to crop screenshots to show a smaller area of interest rather than the entire browser window
#8

What no NDA? No secret handshakes? pah.