Sufficient Activity Nowadays to start a Pandora focused Blog?

[zLouD]

lol, can you call it "Inside The Box", for old times sake?

I'm open for changes.

Edit:

If that was actually an answer for me of course.

 

[Neelix]

*chuckles*   Given that Streak is still doing his version of that (he recently put out a call for articles for the new edition) I'd suggest avoiding that name.  

Perhaps we could go with the mythological theme and call it:  "Daemons  and Hope"

- Neelix

 

[foxblock]

Okay here is the deal.

PandoraPress was shut down because there was basically no help from the community, at the end I was holding up all on my own and that burns you out really quickly.

As we announced the close-down, everyone was like "oh noooo, don't do that! I will help!", but guess what, nobody followed through. A week later everyone had forgotten about this. I don't blame them, no worries.

But I am afraid this will be going the same way.

I am absolutely willing and happy to give a new team editor access to PandoraPress, but please give me something solid. Give me a team of writers willing to stick to the flag and give me a realistic(!) plan of content you want to publish (what, when and by whom).

Besides, there are three new projects which have been started after PP's closing, it might be worth considering reviving one of those instead:

http://buechse.openpandora.de/ - mainly focussed on reviews, tutorials, etc., could be restructured for news, too - contact büchse on this forum

http://insidethebox.pmprog.co.uk/ - eZine format, a bunch of articles every edition, probably not good for news - contact pmprog on this forum

Inside the Box, StreaK edition - same name, different project, PND version of an eZine, besides that same format as above

I would love for someone to bring back life to PandoraPress and I am totally willing to help. I am just trying to make sure you will follow through with that.

As mentioned above if you are interested, send me a plan and I will set everything necessary up over on the site.

Cheers.

 

[foxblock]

I'm sure there are other blogs out there, so far none have posted an invitation for contributors here recently, including the defunct pandorapress.


And about pandorapress.net, a couple of us volunteered our services but no reply was received. Which I think was pretty sad, maybe a bit rude too.

Looking through my inbox I cannot find a message about that subject by you.

I recall discussing it in the thread, but I don't recall being contacted with any concrete information, so I assumed everyone had lost interest.

I am very sorry about that, feel free to contact me again under the term listed in my post above.

 

[_wb_]

Let's use the Buechse website for reviews and tutorials. I went ahead and added a post there, announcing that there will be reviews of the DragonBox compo entries - I can do a few of those myself, but it would be nice if many other people would do the same. Let's do it!

We could try to revive PandoraPress too, although I guess the main problem is that there's not that much news to announce anymore: production is going fine, so not much to report.

As for the e-zines: those are a good idea imo, but I think it's too hard to make people write stuff for them. So it's probably best to take material from Buechse and the forums and make something like a monthly digest from that, without really having to create new material.

 

[foxblock]

Let's use the Buechse website for reviews and tutorials. I went ahead and added a post there, announcing that there will be reviews of the DragonBox compo entries - I can do a few of those myself, but it would be nice if many other people would do the same. Let's do it!

We could try to revive PandoraPress too, although I guess the main problem is that there's not that much news to announce anymore: production is going fine, so not much to report.

As for the e-zines: those are a good idea imo, but I think it's too hard to make people write stuff for them. So it's probably best to take material from Buechse and the forums and make something like a monthly digest from that, without really having to create new material.

I agree that there is not much news to report anymore, which makes generating content for the blog harder and is exactly the reason why I want a solid plan. You need to come up with categories like the "Game of the week" series we tried, things like interviews with devs, "The Hourly Hardware Hack", "Weekly forum drama recap" or whatever. Biggest problem is finding dedicated people for these.
The eZines are brilliant because you can gather a good chunk of articles for one release, there is no need to push out something every week and everyone can take as long as he or she needs (in a certain limit).

Writing articles for them is as hard as writing articles for a blog, there should not be a higher standard for the eZines or a lower standard for the blog, neither in length nor quality.

The problem I see with Büchse and putting tutorials on there is that you better put those on the wiki and have everyone contribute. Using it for reviews is fine (but then you can post them in any of the mentioned projects).

 

[pmprog]

lol, can you call it "Inside The Box", for old times sake?

I'm open for changes.

Edit:

If that was actually an answer for me of course.

Don't worry about it, that was just a joke. As foxblock pointed out, we've had two (different) "Inside The Boxes"

Edit: I was tempted to see if anyone wanted to assist with a new edition, but as Beef popped back up and appears to be doing one, there ain't much point. That and all my free time has disappeared

 

[_wb_]

The problem I see with buchse and putting tutorials on there is that you better put those on the wiki and have everyone contribute. Using it for reviews is fine (but then you can post them in any of the mentioned projects).

The wiki is the place to put general tutorials, like how to get a dev environment or how to tweak your window manager. Buchse is good for specific tutorials, e.g. my Microbes custom themes tutorial, since it does not make much sense to put those on the wiki. It's main focus should probably be reviews.

The advantage of something like Buchse is that you can add reviews one at a time, asynchronously, and have them available immediately - no eZine deadline schedule needed. It could then later be used as one of the sources of material for an eZine. The main advantage of an eZine is that it's useful for people who are not closely following the boards and the blogs, so they can get a good idea of the most important developments without having to wade through dozens of forum threads.

 

[foxblock]

The wiki is the place to put general tutorials, like how to get a dev environment or how to tweak your window manager. Buchse is good for specific tutorials, e.g. my Microbes custom themes tutorial, since it does not make much sense to put those on the wiki. It's main focus should probably be reviews.

"e.g. my Microbes custom themes tutorial, since it does not make much sense to put those on the wiki" Why? The wiki is a place for everything related to Pandora, so I don't see why your tutorial would be out of place.Besides a wiki is more organized, it's easier to search and find what you are looking for, there are more layout and formatting options (the format simply is better suited in my eyes), you have an edit history and other people can help and collaborate.

On the other hand Büchse is much more suited for reviews, they don't belong on the wiki (can be linked of course).

Anyway, I am slowly but steadily getting off topic here

 

[quartercast]

I'm sure there are other blogs out there, so far none have posted an invitation for contributors here recently, including the defunct pandorapress.


And about pandorapress.net, a couple of us volunteered our services but no reply was received. Which I think was pretty sad, maybe a bit rude too.


Looking through my inbox I cannot find a message about that subject by you.


I recall discussing it in the thread, but I don't recall being contacted with any concrete information, so I assumed everyone had lost interest.


I am very sorry about that, feel free to contact me again under the term listed in my post above.

I didn't contact you, I contacted gruso directly, in addition to posting on the boards several times. I accept your apology, thank you for that. As you can read above I've already committed to this project, if it turns into pandorapress mk2 then thats fine by me. If its something new and fresh thats also fine by me

 

[Timstertoo]

I'm sure there are other blogs out there, so far none have posted an invitation for contributors here recently, including the defunct pandorapress.


And about pandorapress.net, a couple of us volunteered our services but no reply was received. Which I think was pretty sad, maybe a bit rude too.

Looking through my inbox I cannot find a message about that subject by you.
I recall discussing it in the thread, but I don't recall being contacted with any concrete information, so I assumed everyone had lost interest.


I am very sorry about that, feel free to contact me again under the term listed in my post above.

Same thing happened to me. I thought about what I would write about and if I could make the commitment timewise and sent a message. No reply just a forum post that the new contributors were chosen and then nothing happened.


No sour grapes here but just saying that Quartercast is not alone in his experience and you might be giving a wrong idea about the willingness of people to put their shoulders under it.


Wasn't Gruso also helping you? Maybe he got messages too.

 

[foxblock]

Okay here is the thing though: neither of you two ever talked directly to me.

It never was made clear enough, but Gruso pretty much handed the blog over to me and quit the scene as he had too much other stuff to do. Your "applications" probably ended up in Gruso's mailbox and he never replied, simply because he lacked the time (and later forgot about them). I am very sorry for that, but there was no way for me to know.

I don't take single forum posts very seriously and also have given up on hunting people down, because it has cost me too time over the years. We did reach out multiple times over the years (first lead by Gruso, later by me, sometimes public, sometimes private). We contacted new editors, they were willing to help, but then either lost interest or time, so all we had left was the wasted time spent on contacting and talking to them.

So when that topic from back then did not receive any replies after a few days and I had no application in my inbox, it was a sign for me that nobody was very serious about restarting the blog.

This appears to have been a misconception and again I apologise, but hopefully you can see that without contradicting evidence it was the logical conclusion from my point of view.

EDIT: This obviously is a generalisation and does not apply to everybody, I am pretty sure the people who did not reply and are now inactive will also not reply in this thread so the numbers look different from what they actually are

I am not angry or trying to blame anybody here. I am in the same shoes, I lost interest in multiple projects over the years (Wandor, a series of articles on game dev, streaming, ...) and let people down, heck now that we are talking about it I noticed I forgot to post the farewell message I had composed on PandoraPress. It's only natural when you spend your spare time generating free content and entertainment for other people.

Anyway, what I am saying is, I am indeed very willing and happy to restart the blog (or rather invite other people to do so), BUT I want a plan, I want some prior work to see whether you guys are actually serious. It will save both you and me a lot of time in the end.

So gather authors (a few already volunteered), discuss what topics you want to cover and how you want to cover them, discuss possible series and columns, discuss whether a blog is indeed the right format, etc.. Some thought has to go into planning, just like with programming you cannot run in blazing and head first, you will hit a wall eventually and then things will become tedious and a lot of work and you will lose interest. Planning beforehand will not only make things easier in the long run, but also convince authors to spend their time on this valuable project.

 

[quartercast]

No actually, if you bothered to read that thread both me and Trip posted a couple of times to express our interest. And we posted the same day you were "preparing a statement".


As far as I could tell, gruso was the blog admin, he replied to the thread first and in detail. Added to the fact that he was a mod here at the time (probably still has mod rights, knowing how slack things are around here), I PM'ed him.


Basically you did not start that thread, and you didn't make an announcement wishing to relinquish your role and hand over to someone else. You both made the sudden decision to close down PandoraPress, and did it without discussing it with the community, and in spite of interest shown by other established community members.

 

[Binky]

Gruso is does not have mod powers.

---

I would also support the reopening of PP rather than creating a new blog.

Unfortunately I don't have time to write for it myself

 

[foxblock]

No actually, if you bothered to read that thread both me and Trip posted a couple of times to express our interest. And we posted the same day you were "preparing a statement".


As far as I could tell, gruso was the blog admin, he replied to the thread first and in detail. Added to the fact that he was a mod here at the time (probably still has mod rights, knowing how slack things are around here), I PM'ed him.


Basically you did not start that thread, and you didn't make an announcement wishing to relinquish your role and hand over to someone else. You both made the sudden decision to close down PandoraPress, and did it without discussing it with the community, and in spite of interest shown by other established community members.

Here are a few questions you have got to ask yourself: Why didn't you bother to contact any other people (like me) or post in the thread again after Gruso did not reply? If you had been interested in writing for the blog, why didn't you reach out to us before we decided to call it quits? The blog hadn't been updated for a long time, what does our farewells change so you wanted to keep it alive all of a sudden?

I agree that the situation wasn't handled in a good way back then, it was a mixture of lack of time, frustration and selfishness and I take the blame for that.

Now let's discuss how to actually get the blog back to life and I am happy to hand over the keys (as much as I am able to, the domain for example is still owned by Gruso).

 

[sswam]

ok everyone stop arguing about whatever and let's get down to business.
 
We are going to restart Pandora Press, and we are going to write tutorials, reviews, articles on pnd.to/box (buchse.openpandora.de) and the other blogs.  If people want to port tutorials to or from the wiki, that's fine too.
 

BUT I want a plan, I want some prior work to see whether you guys are actually serious. It will save both you and me a lot of time in the end.

So gather authors (a few already volunteered), discuss what topics you want to cover and how you want to cover them, discuss possible series and columns, discuss whether a blog is indeed the right format, etc.. Some thought has to go into planning, just like with programming you cannot run in blazing and head first, you will hit a wall eventually and then things will become tedious and a lot of work and you will lose interest. Planning beforehand will not only make things easier in the long run, but also convince authors to spend their time on this valuable project.

 
okay, this sounds sensible
 
These people want to contribute:
 
- ekianjo
- quartercast
- DREDD (me, keen to write ... and moderate with a big stick)
- büchse (the buchse "Box" blog)
- erico (might be able to "help with a few gfx")
- Bane1 (might write every now and then)
- StreaK (inside the box e-zine)
- foxblock ("I am totally willing to help")
- pmprog (inside the box online)

Red means "seems keen to revive and do some major work on Pandora Press"

Blue means "created their own blog / Pandora magazine"

I think a team of >= three is plenty to get Pandora Press up and going again.

Here's a plan of articles and series that I am keen to write for Pandora Press.

There's still plenty to write about.  I have time to post maybe 3 to 5 times a week.
 
- updates on the latest competition, and progress of the projects
- news posts about the best new games, ports, emulators, apps, updates as they are posted on the repo / boards, more than one in each post
- news posts about promising alpha / beta / preview / work-in-progress software
- a series on the best games, apps, emulators from the repo; and the best games we can run in emulation, again more than one per post
- a post about my repo mirror http://pandoria.org/
- news and progress on the Pandora nxt operating system
- update on our alternative operating systems, such as Android, Debian, Slackware, ...
- news posts about new major tutorials and reviews on buchse
 
Some things I want to write on buchse, I could maybe manage one of these each week:
 
- tutorial on getting started with emulators
- tutorial on writing a simple game in C, with SDL and OpenGL
- tutorial on learning computer programming the fun way, using the Pandora, aimed at kids and other beginners
- tutorial on porting / building software for Pandora, on the Pandora
- tutorial on creating a PND package for your app or game, on Linux, Windows, Mac, and direct on Pandora
- tutorial on creating a PND using an alt-runtime language like perl / python / ruby / java
- tutorial on setting up a cross-compiler system, on Linux, Windows, Mac  (separate articles)
- using Pandora for portable media player (music and video), including recoding videos optimally for Pandora with mencoder or similar
 
I love to write, and am enthusiastic about the Pandora as you can see.

We have four different blogs, and that's okay.  Pandora Press is the most important, as it is already successful.

But the other blogs will be good for longer articles, we might want to merge the buchse / pmprog / StreaK e-zine, or share some content.  We should get pmprog and StreaK on this thread too...

Let's do more planning and collect some more article ideas, or prepare actual articles, in the thread.

Someone has to write a "We're BACK!" post for Pandora Press, too, and summarise what's been going on for the past year!

I reckon the main thing that killed Pandora Press was excessive off-topic negativity in many comments by some overly vocal people.  If I am involved, I absolutely won't allow that at all, not even mild off-topic complaints.  We can have a weekly "pre-orders progess" post, and people can bitch about their lack of Pandora there - and ONLY there.  I hope you all will agree that this is a good idea.  The Americans can take their "free speech" and smoke it.  I won't allow the "free speech" of uncivilised idiots to kill the whole blog ... again.

// Dredd out

( gotta work on staying in character )

 

[ghostpatch]

please decide on one blog. I don't want to check on three differnet blogs to find lets say one new article every three days. The reason is simple - many users (including myself) also have other blogs they frequently check

also a Pandora blog shouldn't specialise in only software or hardware.

 

[sswam]

I am going to work on at least Pandora Press and buchse, they each have a different focus.

And, there is this thing called an RSS aggregator...  (I should start using one, myself.)

 

[sswam]

hey is there like a USB hardware divx/mpeg encoder that we could plug into Pandora, that could be rather nice

I could settle for h264, if someone can help me get the Pandora to play it in real time...

I guess I can plug my laptop into the Pandora ... but it's not so portable ...

(there's my off-topic post for today)

 

[quartercast]

@foxblock: I didn't press it further because I felt ignored and unwanted. Why didn't I express my interest earlier? I don't see how that is relevant.


@dredd: are you making a decision for ekianjo and myself there?