We have approved a blog, now help with topics, logistics and volunteering

Question

Right - we have enough interested folks, so next steps...

First - Logistics: @Rebecca - I have been following the blog chatroom and I think we can make this work, but there are a couple of questions

• How to we kick off? @Rebecca - when do we go live?
• Timelines? - had we agreed that a post at least once a fortnight was good (but that the exact timing wasn't critical as many will just follow the RSS feed)
• How do we gain access? (CMS, user authentication etc)
• What review/editorial structure is there? (through SE team, or through volunteers at our end?)
• If it is managed by us, @IvoFlipse had a good idea of holding a shared google doc with a list of topics and names so people could write articles and have them ready for publishing as needed.

Update: we also need to do this:

Define the scope and purpose of the blog. Is the blog about the site? Is it about the site’s topic? Is it about the industry around the topic? Keep in mind the audience of your community and their interests. Another generic blog about may not be all that interesting.

So also also add some responses on that topic. Where is the demand? What can we add?

Next - topics:

Having a look at the highest ranked questions gives us Passwords as the most popular topic, so how about a bi-monthly password article?

Also ranked highly are

• Hardening/Secure build
• Corporate/People aspects
• New Security (IPv6, Cloud etc)
• Cryptography (Comms, Authentication, Data Storage etc)

Third - Volunteers:

I tend to do a lot of work in the corporate aspects of security (people, business risk etc) so will prepare a blog post on something in this space by 1st July (@Rebecca, can we be ready to go live with a blog soon after that?)

Can everyone who is interested add an answer here with:

• a topic they can write a blog post on (or topics :-)
• size of post (is it one short one, a long one or a possible series?)

Answer 1

How do we ensure the quality of the blog posting? So that we don't end up with postings like http://gaming.blogoverflow.com/2011/06/17/redstone-101/

How do we deal with different opinions? One think I like a lot about Stack Exchange over Wikipedia is that support multiple answers. So there no endless battles about the right view[tm]. But a blog post should be more Wikipedia like in the sense that it should be neutrally covering all main opinions.

Answer 2

One suggestions that has worked EXTREMELY well for us over at blog.SU has been establishing a 'Question of the Week' blog post were we focus on the details of a really good question/answer. We ask a questions each week on Meta for user to nominate other user's questions or answers. This may be something that you may want to start up. It's great because it allows for more fluid involvement from the community without exactly asking them to blog about things.

Also, with the recent activities of multiple hacker groups, you might consider collecting together suggestions/tips for users to ironclad their:

• Passwords
• Computers
• Home Networks
• Firewall
• Servers (esp from SQL injections)
• other types of preventative measures of protection

Congrats on getting approved for the blog, and best wishes to you all! Let us blog.SU'ers know if there's anything we can do to help.

Answer 3

Having a look at the highest ranked questions gives us Passwords as the most popular topic, so how about a bi-monthly password article?

Or a bi-monthly "authentication" article? I'm pretty certain we'd run out of things to say on passwords after 24 articles!

In terms of volunteering, I have somewhat limited time, however, I am happy to read/provide feedback on anything before it is put live, however, I can't make any absolute guarantees I will always be able to do so month in month out. I would suggest other people probably have the same problem, so is it worth identifying X number of editors and making a publishing requirement "must be read and OK'd by Y of these" (disallowing approving your own content, ofc)? Pick your own numbers there.

I agree with Hendrik in that we need to prevent that sort of article from happening.

On the subject of differing opinions, I think that makes two blog posts, or a combined post providing both arguments where there is actually no answer.

Finally, I'd like to write some articles. I'd particularly like to extend my post on "how does the secure desktop work?" to verify some of the slightly hand-wavy conjecture on the subject of DLL injection etc, but that'll take time to prepare (as in, not enough screenshots and freehand circles yet).

Answer 4

When do we go live?

I hope to have your blog up this week. Jin is working on the WP theme for it.

How do we gain access?

This is just a regular WordPress setup. I'll set up one or two administrators, and then it is up to the community to run the blog pretty much. You'll be able to add a new user as appropriate.

What review/editorial structure is there?

You can use the permissions within WordPress to help with this.

If it is managed by us...

Yep! SE is here to provide the resources for the blog, but this is definitely a community-run blog. We're absolutely here to support you, but the typical running of the blog activities are all you. (:

Answer 5

I'm happy to help as an editor also, and agree with @ninefingers that having a somewhat distributed scheme for approval would match the scheduling demands that most folks have. And +1 on "authentication" being a good topic which includes "passwords". Though I doubt that establishing specific timing goals for specific topics is a good idea.

Answer 6

Happy to volunteer to write an article a month, if you still need any more. Is it ok to cross post it to my personal blog though?