[drn-discuss] Some recent press stories

[Rufus Pollock]

As already demonstrated by this thread everyone has there way of doing 
things.

Personally I too like the low-tech wiki approach. However note that 
drupal is *not* a blog. It provides lots more and it can certainly do 
what you want for the list of links, either:
   1. create a story item with contents just being the link (and a 
summary if you wish) and categorize its item types being link + news. 
This will also get you a listing of links for free (just click on 
category link on left).
   2. Alternatively you can have a dedicated page on a given topic and 
just have everyone add to that page (just like in a wiki).

Drupal is very flexible: if you want to treat similar to a wiki you can 
(you can then view the front page 'blog view' as simply the equivalent 
of a recent changes). We considered a wiki when setting this up but 
Drupal had several advantages:
   * easier to use for non-technical people especially for doing admin 
such as permissions
   * easier categories (multiple categorization etc)
   * more plugins

Thus for the time being I would suggest giving the drupal system a go. 
If it really does not do what you want post again.

Regards,

Rufus

James Heald wrote:
> Andrea Rota wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 03:19:16PM +0100, James Heald wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>>> A blog is all very well, but I think that there are some real 
>>> advantages to providing a page like Swpatcnino, which can aim to be 
>>> pretty comprehensive in terms of links, but limited to just a 
>>> one-line summary for each item.
>>
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> * the bar is much lower for people adding stories, if they can just 
>>> put up the link, and don't need to add any commentary.  (Though they 
>>> could write and link one if they want).
>>>
>>> * it's useful to be able to scan through just the headlines, as a 
>>> short index -- much easier than scanning down a whole blog; and 
>>> easier to find or spot new items.
>>>
>>> So hence my suggestion, for someting much more like 
>>> http://wiki.ffii.org/SwpatcninoEn   and much less like a blog.
>>
>>
>>
>> Easiest way to do this would be: whoever wants to contribute adds an
>> entry to her/his own de.lirio.us bookmarks list, with a special tag
>> (e.g. "drn.press") and then the RSS feeds with this tag are aggregated
>> on http://drn.okfn.org/.
>>
>> The news aggregator is already there, and adding feeds can be done by
>> any contributor.
>>
>> Lightweight, easy and distributed - does it make sense?!
>>
> 
> The alterantive, which is perhaps even more entry-level, and FFII has 
> found works well, is just to have a wiki page that people add a line to 
> the top to, whenever they want to add a link to a story.
> 
> As well as being very straightforward, for anybody with write-access to 
> the page to be able to do, it also has the advantage that you directly 
> control what the listing looks like; it makes it easy for people to add 
> follow-up links, eg to comment blogs, or say wiki pages tracking 
> particular issues; it is easy to correct mistakes; and it's also very 
> easy to remove entries which aren't really on topic.
> 
> It's a bit more low-tech, because it means the aggregation is being done 
> manually; but in practice, it's no great inconvenience - it only takes a 
> moment to add a line to a wiki.
> 
> 
> 
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