So, you want to write for the Daemon News?

Copyright © 1999 Chris Coleman

The Daemon News is a volunteer magazine; everything from the web space to the feature articles are donated to the project. This allows us to bring you a very cost effective (read "free") online magazine without the distracting advertisements that clutter some of the other news sources.

However, this comes with a price. People need to write, submit, edit and review articles; maintain the web site; and a host of other activities to produce a quality product. Thankfully, this is not a new development style. Almost everyone that reads this magazine is familiar with it and contributing to another project in the same manner. Because of this, we have been fortunate to have plenty of articles to publish each month.

From the beginning, we have striven to make this project easily accessible to those who want to contribute. We designed the format and writing schedules to be flexible and adaptable to authors who want to contribute a little or a lot. Most magazines ask regular authors to write 12 articles a year, one per month. This can be very burdensome and make many "part time" authors shy away because they don't have time to produce enough quality articles in the limited free time they have.

Our approach to this problem has been very simple: time share regular columns.

Twelve is a very divisible number. It can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. This opens up lots of opportunity for authors to share a regular column. If you have only one author, you have to write twelve articles a year, but if you have two authors, that number drops to only six articles per year. As editors, we prefer to have two authors per column, but we have decided to allow three or four authors team up and present us with a new column. Anymore than four authors and it is no longer a regular column; it becomes too much work for the authors to coordinate by themselves.

I have thought about this for a long time and have wanted to open up a regular column that I know many authors will have an interest in writing for. I want to base it on people's experience using BSD. The problem is that most people will have only one or two experiences that they want to write about. It would be very difficult to get two or three authors to write about their experiences regularly. If I only announced that I wanted articles on that topic, I would get some articles, but it would be sporadic and disorganized. I want it to appear as though it is a regular column and has a steady stream of well written articles by different authors who planned it to be this way, even if it isn't.

I am announcing a new regular column that has no set authors and anyone can contribute to it. I am calling it "Adventures in BSD". Primarily, I am looking for real life experiences using BSD at home, in the office, or where ever. You should be specific and mention the BSD operating system by name. You should be discreet and not mention any companies by name that might be adversely affected by your article, unless you feel you need to. This is a good column for new BSD users to share their experiences at installing BSD for the first time, or why they switched from another OS to start using BSD. People who have started BSD users groups should also write up their stories and submit them to this column.

I have been trying to start a column called "All Things BSD", which would focus on the history of BSD and humorous stories about the people in BSD. I have been trying to get regular authors for that column for a while now, without much success. So, if you are thinking about writing an article for "Adventures in BSD", but feel it might fit better in "All things BSD", just put "All things BSD" in the subject of the e-mail when you submit your article.

It is extremely easy to submit an article to the Daemon News. Just send your completed article to article@daemonnews.org. Once it is there, we will review it and determine how soon we can publish it. Next, it will undergo a very informal proofread for grammar and spelling. We try not to change very much, but catch any mistakes that might have been made. The changes will then be sent back to the author for approval, so it is important to give us a valid e-mail address to contact you prior to publication. Please also include your name and e-mail address at the bottom of your article. The article is then formatted into HTML to match our site. Our preferred format to receive articles is plain ASCII text with any special HTML, such as links or tables already in the document. Eventually, it gets run past a set of scripts that do the final publishing and put it online.

When an article gets put online, or "published" on our web site, it gets picked up by our numerous mirror sites. The current issue is always in English, and some articles have been translated to Japanese. The other mirror sites are welcome to do the same, provided the translated articles remain only on the official mirror site for that country and the copyright remains with the author. Authors should be contacted before translation as a formality to check for any licensing issues, and so that they can offer to help if they have relevant language skills.

If you are interested in writing for the Daemon News, there are a lot of possibilities other than the new column that I outlined above. I have a few ideas for columns that I would like to find regular authors for. Ideally, I would like two people for each column, but I would accept any of the permutations that I listed previously.

COLUMN NAME	POSSIBLE CONTENT
Security	How to make BSD secure / cryptography.
All things BSD	A look at BSD History / Stories about prominent BSD people.
Off the Port Side	Reviews of ports, packages, and new programs for BSD.
C BSD RUN	Beginning C programming for BSD.
Under the Hood.	Advanced C, driver development, and Kernel hacking.
Desktop BSD	X Desktop Environments, Multimedia, Windows Emulation, etc...
The X-Pert	The X Window System configuration and hacking.
SysAdmin	Basic System Administration of BSD, ISP issues, and Server tuning.

This list is by no means inclusive of the types of articles I would like to see. If you have an idea for an article that doesn't fit any of the stuff I have mentioned previously, we will publish it as a "Feature Article". We like to publish four Feature Articles each month, so we need those too.

We have very few stipulations on what we will publish. Basically, we ask that it be about BSD in some form or another. This includes all BSD derived Operating Systems, such as BSDI, FreeBSD, MacOS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PicoBSD and I am sure there are others that have escaped my attention. It also includes supporting systems, such as The X Window System, The Wine Project, and other major systems that have become a integral part of BSD.

The articles don't have to be very long. About 1500 words is plenty, and after 3500 words, we ask that you start thinking about breaking it up into multiple articles. Its quite easy to do, so go get started.

Chris Coleman, chrisc@vmunix.com