create the "Inside Rust" blog

[nikomatsakis]

This PR creates the "Rust Team Blog", which will be visible at blog.rust-lang.org/team. This is a draft PR because I'd like to resolve a few questions:

• prep an announcement blog post for the main blog
• Settled the name ("Inside Rust" wins!)
• Modify PR to use the "Inside Rust" name and adjust other things
• How should we expose this blog on the site? Right now, you'd just have to guess the URL.
  • I'm not sure this has to block us from deploying the blog now though -- there is a lot of demand to have a place
• I added an ad-hoc tag team: core to the first post -- I'd like each post to be tagged with a team, and ideally I'd like that to be visible in the post (and to enable filtering by team/working group). Can we at least enforce that we have a team: tag somewhere for now?
• Any thoughts on the other "front matter" in the blog.yml file? (e.g., tagphrase)
• And of course any thoughts on the text of the inaugural post itself?
• A draft of blog policies are visible here blog policies wg-governance#23
• Remove "dual layout" system and replace with a change to blog configuration.

[rust-highfive]

r? @alexcrichton

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[nikomatsakis]

cc @rust-lang/core

[Mark-Simulacrum]

"Rust internals" blog, perhaps? To mirror users.rust-lang.org vs internals.rust-lang.org -- though I'll admit that distinction isn't super clear either.

[pietroalbini]

Maybe "Inside Rust"?

[steveklabnik]

I was very confused when I saw the email for this appear in my inbox, given that I already think of the blog as the "rust team blog." So 👍 to a different name.

I think "development blog" would be fine. I also like the "internals blog" idea; I agree the users/internals split isn't always super obvious, but I think it's probably fine.

[nikomatsakis]

Another thought I had was the "Rust Teams blog" -- using the plural there kind of makes it sound mildly
different to me. I guess that "Rust Team" and "Rust Project" feel more analogous and that Rust Teams is kind of more clearly "Blog for the Rust teams". Still, it's not a big change.

Anyway, my main concern with the name internals is that it sounds like the blog is about the internals of Rust, which, I guess it is, but only from a certain POV. (Feels a lot like "dev blog" to me.)

Another thought: give it a more creative name, like "Inside the Rust project"? "Rust insider's blog" (that sounds exclusive).

Final thought: Just use the main blog for everything? :) But I still think it's useful to have a separate channel, it'll encourage us to post a lot more stuff on here (e.g., it would feel weird for me to post minutes from compiler team meetings on the main blog, right? But I intend to start posting those here.)

EDIT: I see @pietroalbini and I were coming to a similar theme with the "Inside" concept.

[nikomatsakis]

Updated the main issue with the names proposed thus far. I'd definitely like to get this setup because I have an announcement I want to post. =) I guess most any name will work out ok.

[wesleywiser]

When I first saw mentions of the team blog, I assumed each team was getting their own blog. IE, blog.rlo/compiler for the compiler team, blog.rlo/lang for the lang team, blog.rlo/community for the community team, etc. Perhaps that idea is worth exploring more?

I think there's some interesting advantages to that idea:

• Resolves the naming issue, obviously.
• Allows each blog to be more targeted for its audience. For example, a dedicated compiler team blog could be used to advertise large scale changes to rustc that impact contributors but are of little interest to most others.
  • Periodically, the compiler team also has issues it wants to broadcast more widely and ask for help from the community with. A dedicated blog would be a good place to mention those.
• Implicitly has the "ad hoc team tag" you mention by virtue of each team having their own blog.
• Can be advertised from the Governance pages for each team.

[nikomatsakis]

@wesleywiser Yeah, I definitely considered that, but it seems to be rather a lot of blogs, and I worry that they smaller teams or working groups won't get as much "circulation" this way. I think in my ideal world you'd be able to pick-and-choose the teams you want to "follow".

Still, it would resolve the naming issue, it's true. =)

Periodically, the compiler team also has issues it wants to broadcast more widely and ask for help from the community with. A dedicated blog would be a good place to mention those.

I absolutely expect to post those on this blog, along with meeting notes and the like, and posts from smaller groups like self-profile. If people think that would be inappropriate for a single blog, then I agree we should shift.

[nikomatsakis]

(The other thing is that I think a lot of posts will be kind of "cross-team" -- e.g., are async-await updates lang, or compiler?)

[nikomatsakis]

OK! I propose people give their opinion on one of two possibilities:

• name the blog "Inside Rust" (add 🎉 emoji)
• create per-team / per-working-group blogs (add 🚀 emoji)

I don't know which one I prefer. Some thoughts here and here. Feel free to leave your own.

[steveklabnik]

An additional possible per-blog option is to create tags, and have them be on the same blog, but you could filter by tag.

[nikomatsakis]

@steveklabnik yep, that's what I was hoping we would do.

Also worth pointing out: this is not an irreversible decision. We can always break out sub-blogs later, or add special urls that filter by tag.

[nikomatsakis]

OK, it seems like the "poll" has spoken:

"Inside Rust" it is! I think the plan is that we'll enforce the team: tags (informally, perhaps, to start) and at some point enable filtering in the UI (and perhaps RSS feeds or whatever as well (do people still use RSS?)). I'll take a look later to see how hard it would be to reject posts without the team: tags, can't be that hard, right?

I think the only other major question that we probably want to settle before deploying is:

How should we expose this blog on the site? Right now, you'd just have to guess the URL.

Of course we don't have to link the site from the main page, but it seems like it'd be nice to. @skade @Manishearth, any thoughts on this? Should I just take a stab to see if I can figure out how to add it to that "main list" at the top of the site of pages? (i.e., next to "Blog") It feels like a major change to the site UI that might get kind of "busy".

[skade]

We should link it from the page somewhere.

[nikomatsakis]

Hmm, we no longer have a "contribute page", right?

[nikomatsakis]

But maybe we can link to it from the Governance and Community pages, or something?

(For example, near the list of teams)

[nikomatsakis]

OK, I went a little crazy, and upgraded the code a bit to respect the team and team_url metadata, and incorporated that into the layout:

This is about the limit of my web-design skills.

I decided against making team an enum because I didn't want to add PRs to the blog each time some new team wants to publish or whatever. On the other hand, maybe just saying "core" is a bit terse. I don't know, seems ok for now, we can improve.

[nikomatsakis]

So, the only question is how to incorporate this into the main site -- and @skade I realize now that this is not something we can do in this PR anyway.

The URL would be blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust, I believe.

[nikomatsakis]

r? @pietroalbini on the code changes

[nikomatsakis]

or maybe @steveklabnik =)

[nikomatsakis]

Idea: I will look into creating a link to the Inside Rust blog from the main blog header or something also, since it seems likely people would try to navigate that way. That plus a link on governance page seems good.

[pietroalbini]

Yeah, a required_team: true in the blog config could work.

[nikomatsakis]

@pietroalbini ok I changed the setup as requested. There is still no link to the inside-rust blog from anywhere else, not sure what to do about that.

[nikomatsakis]

how it looks now

[nikomatsakis]

I added some code to list other blogs in the "posts index" page. It...doesn't look great yet. But maybe something similar could work.

[nikomatsakis]

Probably it would look better in the upper-left corner :)

[pietroalbini]

Modulo that minor nit the code changes looks good to me! I defer to Florian or Manish for the design though.

[nikomatsakis]

I think I'll revert the "see also" work I did, as I think it's pretty horrible looking.

[nikomatsakis]

OK, I decided to take one more stab at the idea. I realized that the current "Posts" text was pretty minimal anyway and added the ability to customize the html that appears in the index. Now you have something like this:

and on the Inside Rust blog:

I've pushed those commits. Obviously would love feedback on the text itself!

[nrc]

In the Rust blog, maybe s/we/the core team to be consistent with the other blurb, otherwise lgtm

[nikomatsakis]

OK -- I've pushed a few minor commits including an "Announcing the Inside Rust blog!" post for the main blog. I've dated that post for tomorrow, October 3rd, since I figured I'd rather announce this thing tomorrow vs tonight.

Therefore, if you've any last feedback, please make it known before tomorrow!

cc @rust-lang/core

[nikomatsakis]

OK, I'm going to pull the trigger here!