Notes on writing news items for TSS

I think it's great when people post news to TheServerSide.com, because it means that there's community involvement, and it also means that readers aren't relying on me alone to determine items of interest. So please, feel free to post news to TSS all you like.

That said, though... I have a few suggestions for those who post.

1. Never quote yourself. Please. For one thing, it looks unprofessional. For another, I can't help but laugh at it, and it's really hard for me to promote an article that makes me laugh at the author, because I see that as being insulting to the author in question. In the last week, I've gotten two articles like this.
2. Try to use the elements in the post. The title is your one shot at delivering the core body of the news. The summary is where you have a chance to explain why the summary is relevant. The body is where you get to ramble at length, to explain exactly what you think is relevant, in detail.
3. Good writing counts for something. If you can - and I realise that, as programmers, english composition is often fairly low on the scale of importance - try to write concisely. Answer the old "Who, what, when, where, why, and how" set as much as you can and as much as is relevant. If you don't, somebody has to. Generally, that's me. It's my job, and I don't mind it, but let's be honest: you know what you're trying to say better than I do, and forcing me to edit your text means you'll get a lot of what I think. I'm not a great thinker. Don't rely on me to understand unclear prose, if you can help it.
4. We're not trying to be an aggregation service. Including links in the news post is fine, but make them count... and please be kind to your humble editors. "Click here" sucks.
5. Releases are great - but we really try to focus on major releases. And we see major releases as "point releases." We realise that the difference between "version 0.3.23 build 3167" and "2.0" are semantic in nature, artificial points in time... but the latter is a good candidate to be promoted as news, and the former is not. If you're going to use minor releases for major functionality - and it's newsworthy - you should explain so, very explicitly, and please - if only for me - mention when you're planning to go to a point release.
6. Speaking of releases, early and often is great for OSS, lousy for "newsworthiness." We try (emphasis on "try" there) to mention things once every few months at most. Release every week, and you have a userbase that's always in flux, and your product becomes a muted hum on TSS - not that we're the focal point for all release activity, but if you're interested in being on TSS, remember that news is all about peaks and valleys, not about regular ol' hills. Major releases are peaks. If you have a peak surrounded by other peaks, it's not THAT much of a notable thing after all.
7. Hold off on announcing every release candidate, if you can. Sometimes a release candidate is real news due to market penetration or a particular visibility - think Spring or Hibernate here - but more often than not, release candidates are a great way to give us a chance to oversaturate TSS with product near-announcements. Don't announce Widget 1.0-rc8, especially if Widget 1.0 itself is due in a week.

Of course, there are exceptions to everything, and a huge part of my job is trying to discern and fix these things myself, so don't use this as a barrier to posting on TSS - please! After all, anything someone posts indicates that someone is interested, so stuff like that isn't discarded out of hand, ever. (Even if it's not promoted anywhere, it's taken into account.)

But gosh, these suggestions would certainly help me quite a bit. (For the record, I'm fully aware that I violate them myself sometimes. :)