Who does your blog reach?
You won’t be surprised to hear that at Akademy I spent a good deal of time talking to people about UserBase, how we can improve it, and how it can help with documentation problems. Several exciting improvements are expected in the next few weeks, but I’m leaving that as a teaser for now. First I want to talk about just one of the ideas that was floated, as we sat watching people stir the barbeque.
I remarked that I often saw things in blogs that would be interesting to readers, though probably not the whole blog as it talked of technical matters. As an example, I remarked that in Plasma, things change quickly, yet there is little on UserBase reflecting that. Chani’s idea was simple. Have a space to paste the whole blog so that it can be edited down to the parts that users would find interesting. I liked the idea, and began to wonder how we could create a scratch-pad. Eventually I realised that I would be just introducing complexity. There really isn’t a need for a special area. Every user has a User:UserName page, which can have sub-pages. All that’s needed is to use that space as a work area, then, when all is finished, to create a link from the relevant application to a new page for the blogs.
Now all I need is someone willing to try it out and give us some feed-back. Any volunteers?
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“All that’s needed is to use that space as a work area, then, when all is finished, to create a link from the relevant application to a new page for the blogs.”
erm… could you explain that a bit more please? 🙂 I don’t get it. who’s supposed to do what exactly?
@Chani:
As a registered user you would already have a page called User:Chani. If you type http://userbase.kde.org/User:Chani you can use that page any way you choose – I use mine as a scratch-pad. Go one step further, and type http://userbase.kde.org/User:Chani/Blogs – and you will get a clean page into which you can paste one of your blogs. You can then edit it any way that’s needed to turn it into a user-centric blog. At that point, assuming that it is about Plasma and Activities, you’d look at /Plasma#Activities_and_Virtual_Desktops and /Plasma#Further_information and decide where you want to create a link to a new page where you will paste in the new version of your blog. You may want to drop in to #kde-www if you are unsure of that part – we can help you with the practicalities. It’s actually much easier than it sounds.
Notice, too, that the existing entry on Activities was surely written by a developer, for forgot that “Use Cases” is not a term that most users will find familiar 🙂
so… I’d write my blog post, publish it… then log into userbase, find my page, create a page there, copy&paste my blog post in there and hope the formatting isn’t too badly broken, then find the plasma pages (have I mentioned I find it hard to navigate our wikis?), look for somewhere appropriate-ish, edit that page and add a link to the new page I’d created?
meh… effort…
🙂 You know you’d love to contribute to our user documentation. It’s not so hard really – when you’ve pasted your blog in (and I’d start with a recent one, not making it part of the same job as publishing a new one) just delete all the techy bits, then polish what’s left to introduce the user to the new ideas. Don’t worry too much about formatting – we can edit that for you. As for navigation, we have a simple model in UserBase. Applications are just one level down, so Plasma is http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma.