Universal Thread Coverages

Level Extreme .NET Magazine April 2008 issue

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Technical Guidelines

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Technical guidelines

The Universal Thread has delivered several coverages over the last decade on top developers conferences worldwide. Those reports offer exposure of the conference to developers and related parties which have attended or not the conference in order to provide a great summary of the conference which includes a balance between the news coming from such events and the technical information coming from the sessions.

Those coverages usually include materials from the keynote, the technical sessions, the networking between peers, the vendor sessions and/or trade shows, night events and related activities. They can include press releases and other related materials.

Technical guidelines
Pictures
Keynote
Content
How to complete your Universal Thread profile?
Tips & tricks
Deadlines
News submission

Technical guidelines

The technical guidelines are as followed:

Do not write your report using an HTML editor. The best editor for us, to allow a proper and clean editing, is simply Notepad. <s> The site is using its own stylesheet. Thus, the editing required to make it fit into our own format will be faster as oppose to removing all unnecessary tags an HTML editor would include.

Images are saved in a JPG format. Whatever is saved in a JPG format will be handled in our images archive automatically by the Picture.asp file which is a file that reads all JPG files from the directory and builds the page for it. If you wish to insert other images in the report, such as a vendor's logo or anything else that would be of a different size than our regular pictures, you may save them in a GIF format. That will make them independent of our images archive.

Images are having a dimension of 325 pixels width and 244 pixels height.

Only save on the server the final version of the images.

When a new version of the report is uploaded, before overwriting the file, rename Index.asp to IndexFriday.html, for example, and then upload Index.asp. Note the renaming is done in HTML extension.

If you work with another reporter, we expect only one will maintain the report file. However, any reporter can upload the JPG files in the directory as each reporter is usually taken pictures of his/her own.

The site is using a framework. Thus, if you insert some pieces of code in the report, just make sure to cut long lines so they will fit ok with our required layout. When writing a piece of code with PRE tag, you can usually cut the text to wrap on another line after 80 characters.

When adding images to the report, do not add HTML code in the IMG SRC tag that will resize it. This will lower the quality of the image. If the image is 190*100, for example, then, just put <IMG SRC=MyPicture.JPG>.

For specific block quote text, we have a special class for that. Just add something like this:

<TABLE Class=Detail>
<TR>
<TD>
My text...
</TABLE>

At the beginning of each report, you may add a line for your signature. This is necessary to let the readers know who wrote that specific portion of text. Just put that in italic as followed:

<P Class=Titre2>Keynote session
<P>
<I>by Nick Neklioudov</I>
<P>
...

Additionally to our images archive, when delivering a report for a specific day, you may want to add two or three images so the report will look better. Just choose which images are more appropriate for that selection. All images are aligned right.

It is recommended that reporters use editing tool such as LViewPro to resize and save the images which will be taken on a daily basis. When saving in JPG, reporters should assure that the quality is set to 95%. Use of PaintShopPro is not recommended as this software is saving JPG files with an increased amount of bytes. This results in about 1 mb of unnecessary additional disk space and increases the load time when viewing the report. LViewPro is recommended and can be downloaded from http://www.lviewpro.com.
Do not put two spaces for line separators. This is useless in HTML. It also simplifies our editing when only one space is used for line separators.
Do not force carriage returns in your report when those are not necessary. A paragraph should be written non wrapped so this provides a clear readability when verifying your article.
When your code includes some HTML code, make sure to replace all < signs with < characters. This will assure your code will be displayed as is. Don't forget, the same applies with your development code if you have some greather signs in it. Avoid including long lines of code. If you have long lines, make sure you wrap them on several lines. Try to not exceed 100 characters. The code will appear with the PRE tag. As the PRE tag is non wrapped, this is why you have to fix the length of your lines.
When you include some code, indent any indentation with three spaces and not by the use of tabs.
Each paragraph should be preceeded with a P tag after a blank line. When we verify your article, it is important that we are able to read it. If you write all paragraphs without any blank line as the separation, this is extremely difficult for us to understand its flow.
There is no need to add a P tag before and after a PRE tag as the PRE tag already includes a paragraph delimiter.
When in need to add a paragraph, always use the P tag and not <BR><BR>.
Have your report validated by a spell checker such as Microsoft Word.

Pictures

In order to report at a conference, each reporter should have access to a digital camera. This is required as minimum picture uploads applies. We usually request at least 20 pictures per day. This will make the report more complete and better appreciated by the community.

We recommend to take pictures where the attendee faces are clearly recognizable and take a great portion of the area of the pictures. We do not recommend to have the pictures taken as "still photos" but have the picture taken from "people in action": talking, laughing, gesticulating, going, doing something, making gestures.

Keynote

If you report on a keynote, please, have it verified or built in parallel with the speaker(s) involved in it. Keynotes usually address press releases and related materials so it is important to make sure the content of that topic has been validated by the related individuals.

Content

The report should include materials which include some words on the conference and the location where it takes place. It should include some words about the organization of the conference and some acknowledgments to the persons organizing it. The persons, the "staff", who all do their best to have the conference running smoothly, should be mentioned - if possible name-by-name - in an acknowledgement at the end of the report.

It is appropriate to mention statistics about the conference. The report may include numbers such as the number of sessions, the attendees, the comparism between years, number of speakers and the number of sessions running in parallel.

How to complete your Universal Thread profile?

Your Universal Thread profile should contain the minimum requirement in order for your article to be published. You may access your Universal Thread profile and make sure of the following:

In the "Update your account" section, under "Identification", make sure your information is up to date
In the "Update your account" section, under "Biography", make sure the English version is entered
In the "Your picture online" section, make sure your pictures are uploaded

Tips & tricks

Here are a few tips and tricks about reporting at a conference:

Make sure to get enough sleep before the conference. Even if you are not reporting, the time you will spend learning and do some networking with other conference attendees will make your daily schedule quite busy.
Write as much as you can during a session. This will make it easier in the evening to do the final editing of your daily content and will not require as much time as if you would not have written anything during the day.
If you report with another reporter, you may decide about your session schedule at first in order to make sure there will not be any conflict of session collisions and that you will both attend sessions of your preferences.
If you report with another reporter, you may email your daily content to the reporter in charge of maintaining the server files.
For the first daily report, we always recommend to let us know once uploaded so minimum quality control verification could be done. Then, for the following days, this step can be avoided.

Deadlines

The deadline for a daily submission is usually between midnight and 2h00 am. For the last day, we allow an additional 24 hours for the submission in order to accomodate traveling requirements.

News submission

Once a report has been uploaded for the daily submission, you can add a news on the Universal Thread to announce it. You may do so by accessing the Universal Thread main page and using the News item either in the .NET or the Visual FoxPro section which appears in the left side menus. From the News list, simply click on Add to add a the news. From there, you can select to which forums it applies based on the conference targeted audience. Enter a summary which would best describe the daily report submission. Note that for the first day of the conference, we usually release a news which tells about the conference name, the dates and the location as well as mentioning the names of the reporters. Add a proper title and the related URL. The news will be submitted to our news approval process and should be online within the next few hours.