Monday, August 6, 2007

Lesley and Wanjiku at HDA

When Lesley and Wanjiku pitched at my workplace today it reminded me of my first days at primary school. Those were the most intimidating days for a young soul then, having to separate with my mother and having to spend the rest of the day with other kids, shouting our names at the instruction of our teachers! It would be a different experience however when my mother would come for a meeting at the school and then take the chance to visit me at my class. A sight of her would invoke a sense of being loved, protected and safe from scoundrels that could stalk me at the absence of my mother.
These are the same feelings I had this morning when Lesley and Wanjiku came to visit me at Health and Development Africa (Pty) Ltd. Being visited increases one’s self esteem and boosts one’s sense of belonging and sense of purpose. It makes the world around you to realize that you also have a belonging that defines your present and past. And that what constitutes your personality is a totality of the efforts that flow from the people who make the foundation of your successes.
I have no language to express my measureless gratitude for the ongoing support that comes from Lesley, Wanjiku, all the WoW interns and its patrons.

Sunday, August 5, 2007

Setting editing permissions for everyone

Hiya Susan...

As the creator of this team blog, you have the ability to set the permission level of all participants. At the moment, only you have the power to edit all posts.

Each individual contributor is able to edit their own posts, and noone elses'.

Also, only you have the ability to change the gizmos and things associated with the design of the blog.

My suggestion is that you open such permissions to more than just you. But consider this carefully. If you offer everyone EVERY kind of permission, it DOES leave room for the old 'whoooooops-I-slipped' routine, where the entire blog is deleted by mistake while someone's editing something in the gizzards of the blog.

Blue skies
love
Roy

First things first... proposed table of contents

Yo Susan... well done on taking the initiative! Excellent work!

Now, who had that proposed table of contents? That would be a great place to start.

And a great tool to use for this project would be the 'Labels for this post' innovation Blogger has added to the mix.

When you're composing a blog post, you'll find the 'Labels for this post' field at the bottom of the text entry box, just above the green button that says 'Append Tags'.

'Tags' and 'Labels' are different things.
Tags are used to categorise a particular blog post in Technorati, a blog-search engine. It's always good practice to make Technorait tags, cos it makes the blog more easily findable in the world at large. See the examples below.

Labels are something different. And VERY powerful for the purposes of team-writing a book. They are INTERNAL category markers for the blog itself. And can be used to sift information. So, any blog post can have multiple labels. This post, for instance, could be labelled 'admin', and 'how-to'.

You can do a 'sort' by label. So, for instance, say you only wanted to see posts labelled 'how-to', you'd click the 'how-to' label on the blog, and this post would be the earliest one in the list of posts.

I propose that there be a single-word label for each chapter, so that when someone writes a post for a particular chapter, they can label it with that word, so that all info pertaining to that topic can be collated easily.

Team members who have editing permission can change or amend labels too.

Blue skies
love
Roy

The Great WoW book project kicks off in a blog

Here's to the first post kicking off our great WoW book project! This blog will be used to collect WoW 2007 team members' contributions to the book project. These contributions can be made any time, anywhere.
The blog will hopefully abolish the necessity of having too many meetings.
So look forward to reading your contributions... and creating a best - selling, successful book.