We are working on revamping our web site for LISTSERV's 10th anniversary,
and one of the features we would like to add is "personal stories" from
people or organizations that use LISTSERV regularly. There will in fact
be two categories:
1. Personal stories, which will focus on one person rather than on that
person's place of employment (although it can of course be mentioned).
These stories can be written in an informal tone, include personal
tips, etc. The idea is to allow people to speak as freely as possible
about how LISTSERV and the Internet helped them accomplish something.
2. Organization stories, which can have a lead characters but will focus
on how the organization is using LISTSERV. These will be a little more
formal and will typically include a link to the organization's
official web site.
Some subjects lend themselves to both presentations. For instance, if
Jane Doe from U. of XYZ is using LISTSERV to help the students in her
Spanish classes get in touch with native speakers all over the world and
turn what could have been a boring grammar/vocabulary class into an
exciting exchange with Luis and all the others, we could have either a
story where Jane Doe, Spanish teacher, says what she has done and quotes
a handful of her students, or then a story where Mary Smith, head of the
Dept. of Foreign Languages at U. of XYZ, speaks of Mrs. Doe's Internet
experiment with the Spanish class and how it will be attempted with the
German class next semester, with quotes from Jane.
The plan is to select a dozen stories in both categories and have them
featured on our 10th anniversary page. Later these will be converted into
"How businesses use LISTSERV" and "How people use LISTSERV" pages. Our
goal is to have over 100 organization stories on the web site. For
personal stories we are still discussing what to do exactly - while it is
easy to organize business stories according to the type of organization,
and visitors will be looking mostly for what similar organizations are
doing, this doesn't map too well to the personal pages.
Anyway, if you have a story to tell and would like to be featured on
LISTSERV's 10th anniversary page, please send us your story as soon as
possible! You will find detailed instructions below about what we need
for you in order to put your story on the web (don't worry if you don't
know HTML, we can do that part for you if you want). If your story is
selected for inclusion on the 10th anniversary page, you will receive a
free L-Soft sweat shirt and a free 10th anniversary T-shirt (we won't
make sweat shirts for the 10th anniversary as it takes place in summer
:-) ). If any of your students are quoted on the page, they too will
receive a free 10th anniversary T-shirt. Here are the instructions:
******************
* Personal story *
******************
The layout will be:
- An L-Soft provided banner that will be the same for all stories.
- An optional GIF (preferably 20k or less). This could be a picture of
you, your classroom, your cat, the collector's car you fix in your
spare time, etc.
- An abstract. This will include your name, profession if you choose to
mention it, and a couple sentences about the story. This will also
appear on the index page. Basically, this is so that the reader can
determine what your story is about and decide whether to read it or not
:-)
- The body of the story, which shouldn't exceed a couple pages. You are
welcome to include links to your personal home page or to other pages
where the reader can get more information.
- It is entirely up to you whether you include your e-mail address and
work phone number.
- A standard trailer provided by L-Soft.
We will edit the HTML in all submissions to use a standard format for the
abstract and so on, so don't worry about fine tuning it.
The story can be about anything as long as it involves LISTSERV and the
Internet (either as a list owner or as a user) and is not self-serving.
If you're a partner in a start-up and want to put in a plug for what your
business is doing, that's fine but you should submit an organization
story instead. People will expect the personal stories to be spontaneous
and the organization stories to contain a certain amount of hype. It's ok
to mention your employer, as long as it doesn't sound like "Click HERE
for our NEW LOW PRICES! Remember to say Mike sent you!" Since the focus
is supposed to be on YOU, references to your employer ought to be limited
to what fits the story you have to tell.
Finally, since this is a 10th anniversary celebration, you are welcome to
end with some sort of wish or other (which we would later remove when the
celebrations are over and the page moves to the "How people use LISTSERV"
section).
**********************
* Organization story *
**********************
The layout will be:
- An L-Soft provided banner that will be the same for all stories.
- An optional GIF (preferably 20k or less). Typically this would be your
organization's logo, but it could be something else. If you include a
logo, clicking on it should bring your organization's official home
page.
- An abstract. This will include the name of your organization, what kind
of business it is in (if this is not obvious), and a couple sentences
about the story. This will also appear on the index page. So, this
abstract is what will convince the viewer to read or skip your story.
- The body of the story, which shouldn't exceed a couple pages. You are
welcome to include links to your organizational home page or to other
pages where the reader can get more information.
- You must include a contact address ([log in to unmask] or the like).
- A standard trailer will be provided by L-Soft. This will probably
include a legal disclaimer of some sort.
We will edit the HTML in all submissions to use a standard format for the
abstract and so on, so don't worry about fine tuning it.
The story can be anything that involves LISTSERV as long as it does not
include any hype. It may be hard to define hype, but it's easy to
recognize it when you see it, and hopefully we won't have to censor
anything. So, to use an L-Soft example, "LSMTP is a high-performance,
high-volume mail delivery product" would be a product description,
whereas "LSMTP is the FASTEST SMTP SERVER IN THE WORLD and delivers
UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE THAT MAKES SENDMAIL BITE THE DUST!" would be
hype, even though it is true ;-) You can include links to your
organization's home page, and to other pages as long as they are
*relevant* to the story you are telling. For instance, if you use
LISTSERV for your online newsletter, it's ok to include a link that
points to the subscription form for the newsletter in question. This page
in turn will probably include links to the mosquito-repellent shower gels
your company is selling. However, unless LISTSERV was used to facilitate
the development of the shower gels, there is no rationale for including a
link to their product page from the story page on L-Soft's web site. Or
we might decide that it's ok for you to mention the shower gels, as long
as it is plain text, without a link. The basic idea is that we don't want
this section of our web site to turn into a series of ads. It should be
more informational than commercial.
*****************
* How to submit *
*****************
- If you have your own web server: put your page on the server and mail
the URL (only) to [log in to unmask]
- If you don't have your own web server, but know how to write HTML: mail
the HTML file to [log in to unmask] and we will contact you about the
GIF.
- If you don't know how to write HTML: mail your story in plain text to
[log in to unmask], and we will contact you about the GIF.
Eric
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