Getting a new look-TWIN-LAUNCH Portal!

Last Saturday (June 10, 2006) was a special day for Technical Writers of India especially for the people behind the portal Twin-India. It was a befitting occasion to be celebrated since TWIN has had worked selflessly for this. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this historical occasion and tried my level best to look as calm and composed I could be in front of a gathering that had stalwarts like Gururaj BS, Vasudha Rangarajan, Suman Kumar, Pradeep Vasudevan and whole set of more.

I reached exactly at 4:30 sharp at the venue Nahar Cottage that is on St.Marks Road. Gururaj,who welcomed all the dignitaries and was looking stunning in his dark green shirts. The host for the show was Anthony Francis,a versatile technical writer who after welcoming the audience asked Mr.John Thomas, the Vice Dean at the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media, to launch the the TWIN portal at Hotel Nahar Heritage, Bangalore.

Mr.Thomas shared his inputs on Technical Writing and reminded the gathering of the launching of his India's first Online Newspaper, Deccan Herald. He saw technical writing a boon for the next generation and said that it should be a part of the curriculm.

Next was the launch of http://twin-india.org that is developed using the content management tool -Drupal. Pradeep Vasudevan gave a brief on how the work on the revamping of portal was started and handed it over to Suman Kumar. Suman presented an overview of how the revamping of portal was done and why they chose to use Drupal instead of other CMS tools like Mambo etc.

A few of the objects while selecting the CMS tool were :
Open-source
Price
User-friendly
Capability of handling features
Search Capabilty

After Suman had completed the presentation few questions were asked as if it would be possible to attach a file these days while sending posts in TWIN. Gururaj responded that by saying that it would depend on the 'theme of the file' and the moderator needs to approve the file first to be posted. A break was taken after that!

After relishing the delicacies of Jamoon, sandwich and samosas, Francis asked senior technical writers to share their TWIN experience. Miss. Vasudha spoke first and than Akash Dubey in his comical note delivered a speech. I was honored to read out a speech of ex-STC India President Mr.Makrand Pandit. A few points that Makrand etched out in his note were to reduce the flame wars that takes place in TWIN these days and to find out some good technical writers from the forum.

The meeting ended with the TWIN List Admin, Sandeep giving the vote of thanks. We all than dispersed.

It was a very eventful occasion perhaps a few more technical writers would have done great.

So enjoy the new portal, and in case you haven't browse through take a look at it http://twin-india.org.

These are my personal comments and in way are related to any groups. In case you wish to respond, please send me your comments at holypriest@gmail.com