dead-claudia
commented
6 years ago I would personally prefer blogs to be done out-of-repo (linking to them is okay), but the way those Gitter discussions have been going on, I feel this particular idea could be better done as a new section under "Tutorials", where we could maintain it as a community. Rust already does kind of similar with their book, although I'm not advocating that particular solution.
I do strongly agree we need a good tutorial that can onboard people very quickly and that we can easily point people to.
kylebakerio
barneycarroll
StephanHoyer
spacejack
The starting point
In relatively recent gitter chatter an idea was floated to implement a community blog for Mithril, to serve as a way to present good practices, ideas, guides and related content in a less formal fashion than part of the official documentation. One motivation for maintaining a blog is that from user anecdotes it's been clear that Leo's original blog posts have been a driving force in gaining interest in Mithril.js in the first place, and perhaps a place to collect similar thoughts could serve a similar purpose and demonstrate the utility that this framework provides.
The reason to maintain a blog as a community initiative is to remove the maintenance and content generation burden from individual people, while allowing for a breadth of viewpoints and practices to be presented.
Suggested content
Some initial thoughts on what would serve as good content for blog posts:
hyped implementations that are more or less trivial to implement with a few lines (see styled components with bss, ...)
... further suggestions welcome, in no way are the above to be considered exhaustive
Breakdown
From the current starting point, there are multiple things to consider, roughly divided into 1) design changes 2) automation and 3) process for content production.
1) Design
Leading question: "What does the end result look like?"
The blog posts should be hosted on the Mithril.js website, and automatically generated like the rest of the website. The website already provides for a reasonable look that can be extended to present blog post data with some changes;
Blogsection to the top-level navigation (Guide | API | Chat | Github)https://mithril.js.org/blog.htmlorhttps://mithril.js.org/blog/, whichever is easier to implement... Additionally, for each blog post, a separately linkable page with a permanent URL, that
Some minor changes in site CSS is probably required to accommodate a uniform look.
2) Automation
Based on the design target and any adjustments, a
blogsubfolder should be created, the content of which is individual blog posts, and supplemental files to automatically generate the blog section and posts whenever the website is rebuilt, similarly to thedocsfolder and the existing website.3) Process
With the above in place, there should be an toolchain easy enough to use for any potential authors to create content. Then begins the process of collecting enough content and maintaining some level of quality for the blog to actually provide meaningful content. To that end, posting frequency should aim to be somewhat constant at a reasonable pace, say a target for 0-2 posts / month with a minimum of 10 posts a year (once or twice a month outside of summertime?). This will of course be guided by how easy it is to find proper content and how eager the actual writers are for providing content.
My assumption is that it could/should be enough to try to collect authors from the gitter chat based on discussion topics there, assuming someone has the presence of mind to highlight that a subject might be well presented in a blog form.
To generate some order for writing/posting, potential authors are requested to submit a title and a one-sentence/paragraph synopsis for their potential posts, and the community shall use
<polling website>to vote on the most interesting topics. After being tasked with completing the post, an author should aim to complete the post in a reasonable timeframe (say around 2 weeks). Finished posts are submitted as normal pull requests to the newblogsubfolder.Open items
markeddoes not support blog metadata? (parsed html comment?)A preliminar flems outlining what a blog post might end up looking like can be found here. Using flems as a blog writing tool with a preview can also be achieved without too much effort, though note that most of the mithril.js.org website generating tweaks (automatic subsection linking etc.) is not in place.
Thoughts and comments welcome :)