Re: blog tags (or categories)?

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Eliot Graff <Eliot.Graff@microsoft.com>wrote:


> We do have a [static] list of upcoming doc sprints on the community events
> page [1]. There's no link to blog posts about upcoming events there, though
> (easy enough to add).
>

There is a list of upcoming doc sprints, but there's no information that I
can find anywhere about those sprints -- where exactly, when, how to get
there, who's invited, etc. If I live in San Francisco and want to go to the
Sprint in March, how do I do that? If I'm interested in the NYC sprint --
where do I get more information?

I was assuming that blog posts are being written about each upcoming sprint
with information about how to attend, and I wanted to surface those posts
by using tags and providing a place for people to read about all the
upcoming sprints. Perhaps I was wrong, and that kind of information isn't
being written up anyplace.


> Do you envision that we link to blog posts about upcoming events from
> there and then re-tag the posts after they happen, so they're then a
> separate collection of blogs about past events? Or is a link to all posts
> about doc sprints in that page adequate, and people can just scan to see
> what's coming and what's in the past?
>

I was thinking about this in the way that past websites I've worked on
worked -- there's two flavors of posts with two different use-cases for the
readers. 1) upcoming events: focusing on giving a person who might attend
all the information they need to be able to make a decision about attending
& then go to the event. and 2) past events: written for a totally different
audience (perhaps), for people who want to keep an eye on what's happened
overall with the project (and who are planning sprints in the future and
want to understand more, and for the people who were there... photos and
thanks and congratulations and such). It seems the second kind of post is
getting written, and not the first.

 Or maybe this is all not discoverable enough?
>

I do think things could be more discoverable. For those people who've
subscribed to the blog RSS feed, everything is neatly in one place. But for
anyone else -- and I'm mostly thinking right now about the user who knows a
small bit about the project, and is trying to learn more, perhaps to
contribute -- I think it might be a bit overly complicated to find what they
might be looking for. It can be time consuming to scroll back through a
blog to find an old post about an upcoming event.

I didn't want to create a lot of new work without the technical
infrastructure to keep content fresh. So I thought blog post tagging could
be the easiest way to make things a bit more user-friendly without
requiring a new level of manual entry.

Jen