The Datenschleuder is notoriously late in publication. Or to rephrase Douglas Adams: "an increasingly inaccurately named quarterly magazine" ;-) And ever since the chief editor and layout person - i.e. yours truly - has been having increasingly more children, that situation has only become more pronounced.

However, things are getting better finally. I've set up a vanilla plone instance a while ago to enable some sort of collaboration in the editing process. And even now, in it's unsophisticated incarnation it's proven to be incredibly useful. For instance, we still haven't customized the Workflow to our partiuclar needs (we keep track of it in one large plaintext file instead) and we aren't doing any fancy XML - InDesign - XSLT stuff any more (we're using XHTML now as our working format - so much simpler!).

But whereas in the previous editions I was the only person doing the layout (and was thus a rightout bottleneck) and only erdgeist and I did any proofreading (and it showed!) we now do the proofreading in XHTML/Plone and then upload the InDesign files via FTP/WebDAV. So now instead of one layouter and two proofreaders we've got 38(!!) proofreaders and four (!) layout people.

And so I'm quite confident, we'll finish the magazine over the weekend - I'm really looking forward to the work. It will be plain luxury to assemble the mag from proofread, (pre-)layouted InDesign files rather than a bunch of unformatted text files all with different encodings, line breaks etc.

Well, better get going ;-)