Re: my last entry: I appreciate all of the valuable feedback I got, including the dude that accused me of acting like a "diva". It made me chuckle, which is a good thing unless you're drinking something I guess. Anyway, the tipping point for the whole conversation is about what would be better for KDE as a group, and the response I got from many of the people inside KDE suggest that I go through with it, and so I will.
I just posted my last regular Road to KDE 4 article to the dot, which will go live shortly once Danny Allen gets his hands on it for a quick edit. (Did I mention that he's amazing?) Future articles issued in this series will be coming to you from Ars, but I will ensure that it shows up on the dot as well.
I will try not to let writing for a bigger outlet affect my writing style too much, and the next time their style guide is up for revision, I will suggest that they permit me to use "email" instead of "e-mail" -- after all, it's spelled as "email" in KMail's own about dialog, so I should use the same string as the application - right? right? /me looks over his to ensure the language purists don't pounce on me.
The "we can always use more press" rant (rated K for scenes of KDE promotion):
The KDE community does most everything out in the open - part of belonging to an open source project - which makes it very easy for those that are interested to find out what's going on. But it is common for our millions(?) of users to all subscribe to the developer mailing lists just to keep up to date? No, but writing a KDE article that condenses this information for our users is relatively easy to do and it is incredibly useful to other users. Projects like the dot are great for in house "advertising" of features, but the dot is a captive audience (with a few exceptions relating to osnews.com or digg.com links...) who already know about KDE. As you folks noted in my last entry, the dot/planetkde is not very good at exposing the world to KDE in general. If they are reading the text, they are already aware of and interested in KDE.
But you don't have to be an expert on KDE to write about it - take a look at Liquidat's coverage of KDE; a good third party perspective that can reach people outside of the normal core. If you have a blog, or any other soapbox you can stand on where people will listen, try talking about KDE. Good articles should be submitted to the dot, and we'll gladly post them. Send a note to websites like digg, osnews, lwn.net, etc. The dot was rejected for indexing by Google News since it only talked about one product (and that is legitimate reason) so if you want to make Google News, you'll have to get your information to more established media like linuxtoday, newsforge or even *cough* slashdot *cough*. Searching for KDE on Google news should not always return results for the Kentucky Dept. of Education. :)
Writing is easy - just pick your favourite KDE application and talk about it. Who knows, maybe after a few months of standing on your soapbox you'll get accused of being a "diva" too :)
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