Looking for article writers

As the new pages of the website are coming into fruition, two of the key areas of it are going to be writing regular articles in the news and featured section.

I’m looking for somebody fluent in English with an interest or background in this area to write weekly, bi-weekly or monthly news (depending on how busy the news actually is). It will also involve writing feature pages on new major improvements and plugins and generally being the front-end media guru for jmonkey.

You will be given a title on the forum as part of the media group and be involved in bringing in new members if and when the time comes.

You will be the people getting our message across to the programming community and convincing potential developers and companies that jmonkey is the engine they want!

EDIT: Our website now has a blog/news section

For a template of how to write an article see the readme section.

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I might be interested to do an article here and there as a guest writer, but can’t really commit to it on a regular basis. I’m not a native English speaker, but hopefully that shouldn’t be a problem.

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To be honest if you hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have guessed - so there’s no issue there :slight_smile:

I guess the same goes here on a non-regular basis (not sure if I’d be a good fit for this, but maybe I’ll reconsider). You might get more people interested if it were more of a “rotation” or occasional volunteer basis. But I understand the reasoning to look for a dedicated volunteer.

A first example (or even a 3rd party example?) might help too, if only to help us understand what the level of effort would be.

It’s a significant responsibility - a news section that hasn’t been updated in half a year or more is worse than none at all!

I’m interested but as the others mention committing to a schedule might be difficult.

If the SDK still counts as “official enough”, one good starting news could be that we just upgraded our SDK to support Netbeans 11 and thus java 9, 10 and 11 (where previously we were stuck with java 8) and that we release a sort of “alpha” to test it out.

The sad thing however is, that the engine/lwjgl3 refuses to work with java 11 (unless we use some hacks/workarounds), if I got that right, so it’s not that much of a feature.
Maybe one can also look at some features implemented in the SDK since 3.0 as well to fill up that article a bit.

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My vision for the news section is that if someone leaves for a while they can catch up, or they can be used as a reference for a feature someone is talking about or enquiring about. And it also shows we are not stale. The SDK fits in that.

Anything that’s news-worthy is worth putting there.

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I could also Vision contributors writing there whenever they implement a new Feature, like nehon did already for PBR e.g.

That even is best for Future maintainers

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Are you looking for one person or multiple? Or a lead + backups? The subject and parts of the original post speak in plural and singular in different places.

Well there will be a topic that presents itself and a list of people that have the choice of writing the article. Not everybody will be free at all times, and one person might fancy the article as their kind of beer. It’s best to have at least a few people willing to consider it.

I’ve already got a good setup on local host ready to put up for the front end. I’m pretty much just waiting to get a hold of domain record permissions.

I’ll be glad to help where I can.

So if I read that correct, you’re taking over the current .org domain (and server too I assume)?

No, not taking over, managing. I already carry out the general server duties on the server. I’m just going to update the homepage and add a few more pages there (news, etc).

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Bumping this thread.

We now have a “news/blog” section on the front page of jMonkeyEngine.org and are actively seeking writers for articles.

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I’d be happy to write some news articles for the website,
and I think biweekly should be doable if there’s enough topics to cover.

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Here is my suggestion - hub members should submit articles for review. Then some articles will be approved according to the criteria determined by the reviewer(s), and can then be published. The member(s) with the highest number(s) of approved articles can be officially assigned the role of the community’s article writer. It’s just a suggestion.

FIB

In my experience soliciting free articles for web sites, you will be lucky if you get any submissions at all. The idea that there would be enough to pick and choose from is super optimistic.

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I see what you mean. At the very least, drawing up a list somewhere would be better than thin air.

One thing that might be helpful is clarifying what the news/blog articles are for. If they’re restricted to jME news (new engine features, etc) you may have some trouble getting authors. On the other hand, if any topic that involves jME is allowed (games made with jME, libraries, tips n’ tricks, etc) you will probably get more takers.

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Describing what’s news-worthy… anything related sounds great. Games, tips, tricks, features, etc… In my opinion (I am not an “author” in these fields) it just has to be related and “worthy”. Would people actually want to know? Will anyone read it? Am I capable of making it interesting?

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Sounds good. I think if you give folks here the opportunity to talk about how they used jME in their projects you’ll have many motivated authors. (I’d be happy to write some articles about how jME is used in my project as soon as I can afford to set aside the time).

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