The purpose of the News team is to publish news regarding Squeak development and use. It aims to provide a service to the Squeak community, highlighting anything which the Squeak users may find interesting in The Weekly Squeak newszine. It will also try to promote Squeak outside its own community, by submitting articles and news items to mainstream websites such as Slashdot and OSNews.
In the past three months I was very busy and couldn't work on the Weekly Squeak blog. Ron has continued writing articles and kept the website alive.
The Weekly Squeak blog ( http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com ) is now getting ~300 views per day, with peaks of more than 1000 views when some interesting articles are published. The RSS2 feed gets ~50 reads per day. In our best day ever, we got more than 2000 views and more than 200 feed consumers.
Most important open issues: - we need more authors. If I or someone else can't post for a long time, the blog risks remaining silent for too long.
Actions scheduled for February: - Publish at least one news item per day - Proceed with the categories reorganization that was discussed on the news mailing list - Look at Lukas Renggli's blog plugin for Pier as a possible successor to the current blog engine - Report on the 2007 SqF Board elections process.
Long term actions: - coordinate with the new PR Team in order to produce articles to be sent to mainstream news sites. - move the blog to news.squeak.org
The News team has a mailing list (news at lists.squeakfoundation.org, subscribe at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/news ). Everyone can subscribe to the list, even if just for lurking, but new team members are always welcome ;)
Giovanni