Technical Question about hosting the articles on sott.net

yoyos

The Force is Strong With This One
Hello SOTT Editors!

I am currently working on a project that will enable the public to conduct investigations online. Actually, before I say that I should probably quickly mention that I've been highly influenced by your amazing community, forum, and the information resource/beacon of light that is sott.net. Thank you all so much for all the incredible and difficult work you've done and hardships, legal and otherwise, you've had to endure to keep this light shining.

I am currently in design phase with my development team and for the investigation platform we are building, the intention is for users to be able to upload articles to the site and then conduct the investigation from there. I have many questions and I guess 1st and foremost would love to offer an open invitation for anyone in this community to connect with me if they find my project of interest and would like a hand in its creation. ..after all I kind of owe my entire personal growth on this community and what I've learned from studying the Fourth Way. Thank you for that introduction. I am already in your debt in many ways due to you sharing this important information with the world.

My team and I are currently creating mockups and workflows and for the uploading articles part...we kind of need help, and I was wondering if I could reach out to the only folks I know of that have figured out how to present the most beautiful news article layout on the web I have ever come across. My question involve things like, what is the process that the editors go through to post the articles on the site? How much manual effort is there vs automation? Things like that. I would be deeply in your debt and very honored to have your assistance.

If you prefer to send me a private message rather than openly here on the forum, you can find my email and social media contacts on my projects website: www.citizenscafe.com

Thank you so much again SOTT!!

Cheers!
. Adam .
 
yoyos said:
My team and I are currently creating mockups and workflows and for the uploading articles part...we kind of need help, and I was wondering if I could reach out to the only folks I know of that have figured out how to present the most beautiful news article layout on the web I have ever come across. My question involve things like, what is the process that the editors go through to post the articles on the site? How much manual effort is there vs automation? Things like that.

Just as SOTT has been through several incarnations, so too have our editing tools / article posting process.

But in short, right now we have a custom WYSIWYG editor so that editors don't have to know much HTML at all. Images are added via a drag-n-drop "Image Uploader". They can go in and edit the HTML directly, but most of the time it shouldn't be needed. The main point of the WYSWYG editor is that when you are editing, you are seeing exactly what the published article will look like - unlike in, say, WordPress.

How we do all that is kind of difficult to explain, and it probably wouldn't help you very much anyway. At one point, we thought about open-sourcing our WYSIWYG editor, but that was shot down quite quickly for the simple reason that the editor itself - along with the whole rest of the site - is all custom-written stuff. It would be rather time-consuming to "genericify" it for general use.

There's also the fact that open source is great, but not if someone's goal is to find security holes, keep them secret, and exploit them.

More generally speaking, my advice would be:

- Don't do things the way everyone else does them

- Don't use off-the-shelf components without understanding exactly what they are doing and how they work

- If you want to create something, learn to use the tools and then do it. This is a big one. I have known so many people who have great ideas, but they want other people to do all the work. True creativity is not just coming up with the great idea, but learning how to use the power tools, building the structure, learning from your mistakes, and then fixing and maintaining it all in the end. It's a process, not just a one-off idea. Make it your baby and help it grow.

- It's never done. I wrote v1 of our article editor 5 years ago. Version 2 came 2.5 years ago. Right now I'm finishing up v3. I would say that v3 is pretty much what I envisioned for v1. Only it took 5 years before I got smart enough to get there!

Finally, I handle the SOTT web sites and mail systems. Years ago when I first began, BTW, I had NO idea how to do any of it. When it comes to pretty much anything, I will take an enthusiastic, diligent, determined, detail-oriented person who knows nothing about how to do the job over someone else who has skills, but lacks the aforementioned traits.

Well, hope something in there helps!
 
Understood. Thank you kindly for the advice and explanations :)

Sharing and communication are always helpful, so definitely helps!

With respect to having others do all the work, I hear you. There are however many people without technical skills that want to make the world a better place. We know that hardcore software development is not up our ally. For example, I have a Computer Engineering degree and write software test automation code with Python and Selenium. My project that I have already been working on for 10+ years is very much out of my league and skills. The scope of my project requires a team to execute. Plus I'm building a community and movement, so I'm going to have to work with others and get people involved that want to get involved with those community aspects being included in my goals. It's certainly my baby...I definitely know what you are referring to with that comment and feel you 100% :) As I said, I owe so much to all the crap that I've been through with the Fourth Way material and all that one endures through that. I am prepared to execute my vision now more than ever :)

Thank you again for your advice and information. I want to assure you it is helpful!!

With this I can be confident in working with my team on a custom solution to the article upload workflow and help people all across the world continue to help each other, help the world become a better place, and ultimately help raise our collective consciousness. If anyone would like to talk more or assist me further, please don't hesitate to reach out! Thank you all.
 
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