Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while - I am in the process of redesigning this blog and migrating it’s content to plone, but I have a love/hate relationship with my site - I hate the word “blog”, and I hate the fact that I have no focus to it. I sometimes hate how it’s all me, me, me. other times that has proved to be a good thing. Either way i’d like to start something fresh.

I’ve actually discussed with a couple of people the idea of a collaborative online magazine, and I think this is the way to go. Therefore the migration of this site to plone will probably be put on the backburner*, in favour of putting together a CMS ready to be used for a collaborative online magazine. That bit is easy - plone is ready to do this out of the box, even without installing third party add-ons.

The tricky bit is what subjects? Personally what I would get out of this is dealing with the technical side on both the back and the front end - using it as a showcase, but I may want to contribute to the content too. So assuming that I might talk about (guess what) digital media/web designy stuff**, the other topics need to at least be able to coexist with this without looking irrelevant. Having said that, I can think of several (paper) fashion/lifestyle magazines that I have read over the years that have no problem dropping seemingly unrelated articles in, so a broad mix of stuff could possibly work well in this context.

I want the site to work like a blog for contributors - they could log in and edit through the web, or use a desktop client to post and submit content, but what appears on the front page would be decided by reviewers/editors. Overall I want it to be percieved as an online magazine rather than a blog.

So anyway, i’m looking for potential contributors - drop me a line with a brief outline of the type of subjects you would want to cover if interested.

*not that it has ever been anywhere but the backburner
**done as non-techie as possible - any specific technical stuff would be posted to this blog instead

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