HELP! I need somebody, HELP! Not just anybody...

[metanewsmods]

Volunteers/Co-mods

I'm looking for volunteers to help make my use of 1st person plural a reality rather than a dream!


Co-Mods.
To help with everything involved in running the comm. Deal with problems, answer questions, make substantial changes as the comm finds its groove.

Link-Finders
To find links! To use the existing pool of places to watch we have, but also enlarge the pool as and when they have time. You don't have to look in all the places. If you prefer tumblr, you can look in only our tumblr pool, and so on.

Graphics makers extraordinaire
Make the comm look pretty! Fancy looking for a nice clear layout that could be standardised across DW and LJ? Fancy making us some nicer icons than the place-holders we have now? Plus we could do with a banner for pimping posts as well.


Anything else? If you can see a glaring omission in anything I'm doing, don't just assume I'll pick up on it. Let me know!

Comments

[hellkitty]

I offer this icon. :P http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/2093516/1443911

Okay, more seriously. I could be a link finder?

[metanewsmods]

Lol, that's awesome, who's it by? Is it yours?

re: Link finding. That's great! Thank you. I'll PM you with the details.

[hellkitty]

Oh gosh how dumb of me. Credit is pellimusprime on LJ.

And yay! :D

[elf]

I can help find links, but not during the next couple of weeks. (Start of school; I'm enrolled full-time after a ~23 year gap. Big change.)

[metanewsmods]

Thank you! And that's fine, if you could PM me, or comment again when you're free? Otherwise I might forget. And good luck with your studies :)

[sapphoatsunset]

http://spire.livejournal.com/42718.html is a beautiful one. And spire has some other pretty ones. There's also refutare.

Or anything by fruitstyle. They don't all translate to DW because of coding differences on the backend so you might have to try a few.

You'll also need to make custom layer like explained here.

[metanewsmods]

Awesome, thank you. I'll have a fiddle with them when I have some free time.

[coneyislandbaby]

I'd love to either co-mod or maybe be a link finder, though I'm not sure how good I'd be at the second. But I can learn.

[metanewsmods]

Yay! I shall PM you with details.

[caput_mortuum]

What kind of icons would you want? Just type (what?), something with an image?

[metanewsmods]

Anything that makes you think of meta really. For the comm I was thinking type might work? Something identifiable that people can recognise, the name: metanews or MN or meta, that sort of thing. For the mod account, IDK it can be more flexible.

Sorry, not very specific. I haven't thought much on it beyond, 'get something good'!

[caput_mortuum]

Okay gotcha, maybe I can come up with something, no guarantees though :)

[caput_mortuum]

Just dropping in again to say that creating banners and icons is much easier once the layout is fixed. Also I wouldn't really try to give LJ and DW the same layout, though I haven't yet looked into how easy or hard it is to import lj styles to DW.

Also I find the way you present the list pretty hard to parse, would you want to discuss alternatives? (It's just some small changes.)
[I've set up an entry here for illustration http://caput-mortuum.dreamwidth.org/2507.html ]

[metanewsmods]

Okay, I'm gonna try and get some things sorted re: layout this week, so if you're okay putting stuff like that on hold? I'll keep you in the loop re: graphics.

Suggestions are welcome! I'm planning to change the format to something more similar to what metafandom used to have for next week, let me know what you think:

title: author -- "quote" or summary.

[tags]

[caput_mortuum]

Great! :D
I've just edited to include a link with some suggestion, feel free to drop in!

[zellieh]

I'd like to offer to co-mod and to help find links. And I have some meta posts that I can polish up and post as well, now that there's a comm for getting discussions going. (Thanks for setting this up!)

I can make headers, graphics, and icons later if you decide on a page style/colour scheme, and the icon with this comment (made by kc_writer) is free to use with credit, if you want to.

Oh, and some advice when choosing styles would be to consider accessibility. Like, set the font size to a minimum of 11 or 12 points, and check that even larger font sizes than that don't break whatever style you choose.

I often find that in narrow, fixed-width layouts the navbars will break and cross over each other if you use a larger text size. The same problem applies for links with text over images: if the image has a fixed size and you use a larger text size than the designer used, the layout looks like a mess and links can be hard to click on.

Also, check that the page style has an adjustable width, to widen for widescreen laptops & monitors (to avoid acres of wasted space and scrolling to read long entries) and also narrow down to fit smartphones & tablets.

For accessibility issues, this is a good, quick article (mostly about screenreaders) to start with: http://hope.dreamwidth.org/1498636.html

This is a useful comm for asking questions about accessible web design and how to achieve it: http://accessibility-fail.dreamwidth.org/

[metanewsmods]

Cool, thanks for offering. I'm gonna be focused on getting the next post up and making sure there's no html screwups and stuff like that today, but I can PM you tomorrow with details and things.

[merisunshine36]

I am BEYOND EXCITED for this, mod! You are amazing! Will signal boost when I am not in the office *g*

I'd love to help wrangle links, but can you let me know more about the level of commitment involved first? I work and am in school, so my ability to spend time online may fluctuate around finals/midterms or busy season at work.

eta: what do you think about having a pinboard account for archival purposes?

[metanewsmods]

Thank you!

Depending on the number of link finders we get, we could do a week on, week off structure. And as long as you keep everyone notified, you could deffo take a week off for studies/work.

For now since we've only got a couple - we're going to divide up the various flists and places we look. For example, you could take tumblr since it's the smallest we have at the moment. Then you would record likely looking links in a shared gdoc. Every Monday a mod compiles the links into a post.

As a link finder you wouldn't need to worry about compiling links, just keeping an eye on your dash/flist, and adding stuff throughout the week.

We are looking into a pinboard. If we get a coding script it will probably be pinboard based. For the next couple of weeks though, we're going to be sticking to hand coding and using DW tags and gdocs etc.

[caput_mortuum]

I'd be interested in regularly submitting links, only not as a systematic effort and more just linking the things I stumble upon on my own - would that work? Would it be best if I went to the weekly open posts for that?

[metanewsmods]

Yeah, the best way for that would be to comment with them on the links posts or on the screened post. Or, if you think the volume of links is going to be too big you could email them to us?

[caput_mortuum]

I think I'll go with e-mail, if it's the same to you :)

[metanewsmods]

Yup that's fine, you can find it on our profile

[rahirah]

I might be able do the linkfinder thing if it's just once a month (I already have a weekly gig collecting links for a fandom newsletter, so I don't want to commit to too much.)

[metanewsmods]

Cool, will PM you.