Reviving the community

Community
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I think that our community is dead in water. I’m one of ex-admins of haiku-os.pl. Our site is gone.

What we can do? We need someone who will be able to post regularly on the mainpage (haiku-os.org).

We need a community manager, which will be posted:

  1. „The app of a week” - we have various ports and native programs. Some screenshots and a few sentences should be enough.
  2. Competitions like: „Wallpapers for Beta”, „Sounds for Beta”, „Write haiku for WebPositive errors”, „Remember about translation for you native language”.
  3. Evry mention about Haiku in the Web. „You are writing about Haiku? Good. We will repost the best articles and posts. As a result you have more page views. In exchange you will be writing more about Haiku (maybe)”.
  4. „Meanwhile on IRC”.
  5. Infographics.

Shorter but more often.

For example look at the http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/.

Why? Because when more you wrote posts, it means that the project is alive (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, OSnews). Besides, we have a small number, so that each of us looks at the main page. In the past, there was a lot of pages about Haiku, in many languages, and now they do not exist.

I think users should be able to wrote blog posts. For example: https://lizards.opensuse.org/, http://planet.opensuse.org/global/, http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Blog.html.

For things like: yab tutorials (Tao of Yab by Clasqm or Streak :P), drawing in the Wonderbrush, making vlog in the Clockwork, artworks, useful bash scripts, some thoughts about: IT, web, programming, art. Practical use of Haiku.

At the moment, if somewhere appears mention about Haiku, the only comments that can be read - it’s nostalgia for BeOS or „it makes no sense."

I can do it, but I’m using broken English. But I’m thinking is better that WE can do it. Someone can write news for mainpage, via WYSIWYG on the website, and moderator just do review and accept. More social writing like in the OSWorld.pl - http://osworld.pl/?s=Haiku/.

In the long term we need a real leader for Haiku Inc. Because in the present condition, I’m not going to pay donations.

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Spread the word in social networks — FB, VK etc.

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Hi,

I’m happy to volunteer to add articles to the home page, if the admins agree it’s a good idea?

I’m from the UK, so hopefully my English is acceptable :slight_smile: I’m a C++/Qt dev by day and Haiku user in my spare time.

I’d be happy to post community news, reviews, tutorials etc. regularly.

It might transpire that the actual Haiku site isn’t really the place for that kind of thing though (more focus on the project?), in which case we might think about a separate portal. However, I really like the new site and forum integration.

Chris

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It’s great that people want to contribute to spreading the word about Haiku. But why does this depend on being able to access the Haiku website? You can open a WordPress account in five minutes and start blogging. Then set WordPress to automatically link new posts to your facebook, twitter or Google+ account. The haiku website is read primarily by people who already like Haiku. What we need is to spread the word to those who have never heard about it.

And what I’d love to see is people writing about Haiku in their own languages. We’re an international bunch, so let’s see your articles in French and Polish and Chinese …

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I guess so.

Perhaps it’s a bit outdated now, but if you compare with the Amiga community, they have sites like amiga.org, amigaworld.net, aros-exec.org and they are typically news/articles with a forum.

Chris

6

We’d be happy to have regular updates on the front page. With the website now being hosted at https://github.com/haiku/website, you can fork and create a PR with your post.
There is one scripts/newblog.sh you can use to create your new blog which will be a folder under content/blog/.
Use scripts/newpost.sh to create a new blog post which will be in your blog folder.

Of course, not every post will actually be published. We may have to come up with rules for that, but defining those is difficult… Until then, I quote PulkoMandy on IRC:

PulkoMandy: the rules can just be “we don’t merge PR automatically, you have to convince the people reviewing your blogposts that it should be merged, and if they don’t want to, publish it elsewhere.”

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Github-hosted site and updates on it over pull-requests and shell scripts.
Damn gods, return me my 2010 year back!

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Thanks - sounds reasonable. I’ll give it a go and see how well the PR is received :slight_smile:

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I’ve posted it at diaspora*.

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I think the site looks good. There’s a lot of fresh content appearing there, which is good for showing life in a community. If a suggestion is okay, only that a lot of the home page “above the fold” is static, like the big download button. Some could be reduced in size or moved elsewhere, to move more dynamic content above the fold.

The Discuss community is showing a lot of activity. The IRC shows a lot.

haiku? Like,

I’m positive that
bad data is the message,
nightly web surfing

I’ll dig into where it is in git…

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p.s. Why are the date in YYYY-DD-MM format? Shouldn’t an international community subscribe to ISO 8601? :slight_smile:

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I think one main idea of reviving the community also would be releasing the first haiku beta (I understand there are still things to be done, just mentioning though) and once a release is out, make sure to get it up on distrowatch, that would attract a ton of people I’d think. There is already a page here for haiku: www.distrowatch.com/haiku

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Indeed! I’ve never seen that format before! US convention is confusing enough, but that beats It…:grinning: What country might that be standard in?

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I, we, tried it with haiku-os.pl. In the past we had big vortal, with news, articles and forum, powered by Drupal. This webpage exists from 2004 to 2016 - http://web.archive.org/web/20151116073346/http://haiku-os.pl/. I think haiku-os.pl was the biggest third party site about Haiku (Haikuware was different beast - software and hardware database). We also had a sister project, myhaiku.pl - http://web.archive.org/web/20150801225412/http://myhaiku.pl/ - because myapple.pl exists ;).

In addition, we published bigger news on the opensource portals.

Someone bought this website, and after database migration, nicks and comments disappeared. However, you can see my old text - Google przekazało 5000 USD na rozwój Haiku | OSnews.pl.
Proof - http://web.archive.org/web/20150520234715/http://haiku-os.pl/node/1562 (Donation for Haiku, Inc).

This is important. Our message has been kept in the manner - we are not “freetards” and we know that life and software costs. I want to attract young professionals, developers, open source activists, students with free time.

We also had great software in the past (this was written during a competition organized by our vortal) - http://web.archive.org/web/20070622155243/http://members.elysium.pl/ytm/html/beos.html, http://web.archive.org/web/20061011040542/http://www.haiku-os.pl/modules/news/article.php?storyid=159. Source code - GitHub - ytmytm/beos-fakBEtur: Program do fakturowania pod BeOS

It simply was not working (our effort). No one care about average geek.

I do not want to write long. Haiku has only 1,832 likes on Facebook. My private page had 320, without effort. There is some lack in communication here.

This is not good for non technical people who wants to contribute.

Thanks! Good to know that they are still exist. It is worth to have account there?

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It’s not ideal, that’s for sure. But consider this:

  • The main website is foremost for news and info from the Haiku project. People seriously interested in being an active part have no issues making themselves familiar with how a pull request works. I dare say everybody that had write-access on the old website already knows how.
  • The trouble to learn about pull-requests is dwarfed by the amount of work that delivering contents means. It’s so easy that 13 year old high-schoolers from all over the world get it quickly.
  • In the decade we had the Drupal site, there were maybe a handful of submitted articles/blogposts.
  • Having a static website has many advantages (@waddlesplash could get into the details). Among it easy contributions to design and structure of the site.

All that said, I expect some people will object vehemently, I’m all for making it easier.
Best case scenario IMO: anyone posts their blogpost/article/anything as a forum post and others can decide to promote it to a blogpost/article/whatever at the main site. I bet this approach will get us many more posts on the front page, because apparently people don’t mind posting in the forums, but may have reservations writing an “official blogpost”.

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great idea, i would like to help with german content (web, twitter, classic pr and »analog networking«).
another idea (not directly connected): something like https://prism-break.org for haiku applications.
a common question is »is there something like xy or how to do xy …«

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Hi,

The PR process was actually quite straightforward, and I got a post published :slight_smile:

For next time it would be useful to be able to preview first - do I need to install hugo from somewhere to convert the markdown to HTML?

Preview would have shown up that there’s no margin round those images, and the Deskbar menu image is waaaaay too big!

Chris

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You can get Hugo from https://gohugo.io – install the binary to your PATH, then run “hugo serve” and navigate your browser to “http://localhost:1313”.

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Jua notified me about that. It was even worse before I moved the image under the fold as the image spanned several posts on the front page. :slight_smile:
I took the liberty of retaking that screenshot and cropping away the actual list of apps, because it still would span a few paragraphs. So, images are best as small as aesthetically possible… BTW, what resolution / font size did you take the shots? It may be advisable to set those to standards when screenshooting.

@waddlesplash, can you add a nice margins around those images? You probably know best where to massage the css for that. Also, maybe put your tip wrt previewing with Hugo into the Readme.md.

BTW, https://stackedit.io/editor seems to be a nice online markdown editor.

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I’ll look at it in the next few days.