OpenPrinting News - A New Approach

I have made it, for 5 years I have posted the OpenPrinting News here every month, everything what happened that month and what we had planned and in front of us, and never skipped a single month.

In the beginning, it was not much work, Before I started here I also did monthly news posts on the mailing list, I just switched to the web site back in 2019 when our current GitHub-based site went live (First issue). The posts were still very short, more headlines than articles. Also running right into the pandemic at 2020 there were not that many events to talk about.

But with the time my write-ups about the different subject matters got longer and more in-depth (November 2022 as example), I got deeper and deeper into coordinating everything to smoothly support the New Architecture of PPD-less all-IPP CUPS 3.x, I got more GSoC contributors for OpenPrinting and they did nice monthly reports, and from 2022 on, when the pandemic ended, I attended (and organized) many conferences which I also covered here.

This got exhausting, as sometimes there was a lot of work to do and not much time to squeeze in the news post, especially when being principal organizer of the Opportunity Open Source and also giving several talks there, attending the GUADEC before and a second conference in India right after, and having to do all the usual daily work … Then having to scrape all what happened in the month together without forgetting anything, adding a nice intro, that all makes it really hard not to forego a month …

This already made everything start to slip. In the beginning the news post for a given month was in the middle of that month. With the time the posts happened only at the end of the month, and this year I ended up to do them only in the following month …

So in the last weeks, after having reached the finish line of 5 years of monthly news posts, I started thinking about how I can do better (sorry for the pause caused by that). Under no circumstances I cannot just stop posting about what we are doing. It is very important for OpenPrinting to get visible, as we are the provider of an essential piece of infrastructure for the free software but not the attractive subject matter where we get swamped with volunteer contributors. The posts also help a lot to onboard new contributors, and last but not least, I by myself can easily check what was done already …

So what I will do now is not collect all the news of a month to put them together to one report, but instead, if I have something interesting or important to tell about, I will do it right away, in its own post. This lets news arrive more quickly, stuff is more freshly in my mind, so I forget less details and less items at all, and old news items are easier to find.

Some of you will miss my intros then, as if posts are dedicated to a given subject matter they start with this subject matter right away. So I will also put some posts with mixed, smaller items from time to time.

So let us start a great and eventful 2025 at OpenPrinting …

And as usual: Stay updated on Mastodon: #OpenPrinting and @till@ubuntu.social.

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