jd in nyc recently exteneded
A Plea to Diarists: Provide Some Insight. Is that going anywhere? Here are some fresh thoughts mixed in with old thoughts . . .
- This site needs a News section for those of us who use Diaries as a filtered-news-feed.
- There is a natural reason why Frontpage comments are not a good place for breaking news, even when the news is about the post. Comments are best read oldest-to-newest. A news-feed area is best read newest-to-oldest. Diaries are ordered newest-to-oldest.
- We need a FAQ area to spell out ground rules for courteous Diary posting.
A FAQ proposal:
Posting etiquette.
One post per day. If you can collect your thoughts over time and post them together, that would be helpful.
Always check to see if another recent diary entry or main blog entry has been posted on the same topic. If there is, post in that thread.
Embed your links in the body of your text. Long links especially should be embedded, so as not to disjoint the look of the columns.
Split your post into Intro Copy and Extended Copy. People judge whether to read your post first by the title then by the Intro copy. If you don't grab them in the first few sentences, odds are they aren't interested. It's impolite to make people scroll past long passages they are not interested in.
Learn how to use Auto-format You don't need to be a web wizard to produce a good looking, easy to read post. Here are the simple conventions that auto-format uses.
And if there were sections:
Put your post where it belongs. Comments anywhere, Breaking news in the News-Feed section, Long analytical original content articles in the Thought-Pieces section.
Time for Sections?
While I like the wild west nature of the diaries I think it may be time to create "sections" using the Scoop software capabilities. Unfortunately, Scoop may say something like, "you know you should have done these sections at the start because now it's going to be a lot of work assigning all the existing posts to the proper sections." (See here)
A major part of Scoops functionality appears to be something called Stories. When I look at my Hotlist I see subsections called Hotlist | Replies | Stories. When I click on Stories it tells me that I "have written no stories." When I look at the Menu box I see a space after Diaries and before Electoral Calculator. Is that space for the button for the un-implemented Stories feature of Scoop?
Stories, in Scoop, are created, placed in an edit queue, voted on, then posted or rejected. Roughly like that. Do I understand Scoop rightly? Does this have a future here?