Request for Feedback on New UWN Approach

[Nathan Handler]

Hello everyone,

While publishing the latest issue of UWN yesterday, I started thinking
about ways to improve and speed up the writing/publishing of each
issue. One idea I came up with would involve posting all news stories
that we would normally include in UWN to the Fridge. This means that
if we do a good job of posting news as we find it throughout the week,
the Fridge will become more of the news portal that we envisioned.
Since some things included in UWN are not really necessary for Planet
Ubuntu, we would adjust the settings and create a special
planet-ubuntu category/feed to allow us to control which posts go to
the Planet.

At the end of each week, a script could pull all posts from the past
week from the Fridge. It could use the tags/categories to arrange the
posts into the proper UWN categories. Wordpress has an excerpt feature
that we have not really utilized in the past. We could use that to
store the brief summaries that we write about each story for UWN.

One concern about this idea that was brought up was that we currently
don't have many people posting stories to the Fridge. Those who do
post tend to do it at their own schedule. While implementing this new
UWN approach would probably result in many new posts to the Fridge
near the end of the week, I do not view this as a bad thing. While the
ideal workflow would be to have these posts to the Fridge occur as we
spot them throughout the week, having them at least end up there gives
us a nice searchable archive (it is a lot easier searching and linking
to posts on Wordpress than our brief UWN summaries).

I am interested in hearing what the rest of the news team thinks about
this idea.

Thanks,
Nathan Handler (nhandler)