AnneW's world

Two weeks since I last wrote, and so much has happened that this feels a bit like a scatter-gun approach, to tell about everything.  Anyway, let’s start by looking at UserBase’s current statistics.

We now have 935 pages of content (how soon can we make it 1000?), disregarding the discussion pages, which have attracted 1,806,159 views!  A tremendous number.  Our registered member number has gone up too, to 819.  Still only a small proportion of members actively contribute, but that is noticeably more than it was a few months ago.

These are the top-10 contribution statistics for the past seven days (yes, eleven again):

Once more our translators account for a large number of edits, but it’s good to see some new names among the content providers as well, and the list can’t include the names of people who send content to me and ask me to add it.

When I look at the Popular Pages statistics, I am somewhat surprised at what I find, though.

Most viewed pages:

The kde-pim applications clearly are heavy attractors.  Although I expected that to some extent, I expected to see more emphasis on some of the other categories, such as Internet, or Multimedia.

I mentioned in my last blog that #userbase was soon to become #kde-userbase.  Well, all that has changed.  Let me tell you the developments that changed it.

The forum team kindly set up a sandbox mediawiki so that I could explore the possibilities and test extensions.  It wasn’t long before we realised that several things that concerned us regarding UserBase did in fact affect TechBase and Community wikis as well.  That makes a nonsense of keeping our conversations separate.  There may of course be smaller issues that we want to discuss separately, but that’s no big issue.  The only sensible thing to do is to keep our main discussions about the wiki in a place where the other wiki folk can join in if they think it useful.  In view of that we are changing our channel, not to #kde-userbase, but to #kde-www, and it will happen this evening (28th October).  A re-direct will exist for a few weeks, in case people follow the link from the old blog, but I hope that everyone concerned with the wikis will join us there.

Let me start with a few relevant facts about my life.  As some of you will know, I spend 60-70 hours every week helping with mailing lists, forums and userbase.  It is a huge part of my life.  However, in a few weeks’ time I will be 70, and I have a serious heart condition.  I may be here for a few years yet, or I may be gone tomorrow.  And what will be my legacy to KDE?  At the moment it’s a handful (albeit a big handful) of wiki pages.  That’s not what I want my legacy to be.

I have a dream for that, and it’s realisable.  I want to leave a system that will spell an end to ancient documentation.  A system that is easy to use and light on time required to maintain it.  A pipe-dream?  No, I don’t think it is.  Several people have said that drafting documentation on a wiki is much easier than working directly to docbook, but getting the parts to talk to each other really makes it difficult.  I’ve talked to Albert Astals Cid about what would help language translation, and I’ve talked to Burkhard Lück about what the docbook team need, and I do believe we could get a usable system, and without much delay.  Here’s what I propose:

Stage 1 – the system is triggered by changes to userbase pages.  It first addresses language needs.
Question: is it possible to create RSS feeds for certain groups of pages?
Problem:  currently the Recent Changes RSS feed is broken, sending multiple copies of alerts.  That would have to be fixed first.

Stage 2 – A mediawiki extension outputs a .po syntax file for the changed page.  I         understand that http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate would do that.  Reading through the page, it looks as though a set of tools already exist that implement export and import.

Stage 3 – the exported .po file arrives in SVN, where the system follows normal development lines.  It may save translators considerable time if a diff of the last two versions is sent as well.  This information is readily available through the History pages.

Stage 4 – the mediawiki tool poimport.php is used to import the returned .po file into userbase.

Stage 5 – starts the docbook cycle.  The mediawiki extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XML_Bridge creates docbook XML from mediawiki pages.  The proposal page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/DocBook_XML_export explains how it works.  The resulting output could be made available through docs.kde.org, on distribution disks, and on userbase.

If scripting is needed to make these stages flow, Sayak Banerjee, of forum fame, has agreed to write the scripts for us.  Many thanks to Albert, Burkhard and Sayak for working with me on this.

So – where does that leave us?  Well, before extensions can be added they have to be tested.  For me to do that I need Mediawiki setting up locally, and for that I need a LAMP stack.  None of this is familiar to me, and I’d be working alone, without any form of help.  I could do it, but in a reasonable time-frame?  I doubt that.  So what are the options?  I’m assured that the system would be an enormous time-saver for the i18n and docs teams, so what is the best way forward from here?  Is it possible, for instance, that I could have access to a LAMP stack somewhere else, to be used as a sandbox?  I need all the help and ideas I can get.

Another week almost over, so what is happening in UserBase?  Well, the translation effort continues, and we have some new pages this week – Yakuake, Rekonq, Tutorials/TweakingPlasma and Blogilo – as well as a lot of smaller updates.  We now have 805 pages of content, with 1,437,927 views.  As you see, it is growing healthily.

This section of the statistics caught my eye –

Most viewed pages
Kontact    222,467
Welcome to KDE UserBase    183,468

For a long time GPU-Performance topped the list, but now only has 45,401.  I wonder if this means that there are fewer problems with graphics drivers?

The page http://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Internet is almost complete, except for the Networking section, and there I need to ask for help from someone who uses remote desktop.  I need entries for KRDC, Krfb and KVpnc.  I don’t use them myself, and after reading what I could find, didn’t feel competent to write those.

Current User Statistics

We now have 580 registered users, an increase of 80 in 10 days.

And here are the top 10 of the week’s contributors.
Score  Pages    Changes  Username
67        60           71            Annew
40        33           47           Qiii2006
17        15           16            Claus chr
11          8           11            Kolia
11          8           11            Yurchor
09          5           10            Just
06        3          6          ????? (Apologies if the Chinese characters don’t display)
06           3            6            Andrei natanael
06           6            6            Alisha
05           3           4             Gdebure

Half of those are people who were not in the last list I published, which is very encouraging.

Last Monday I invited you to come and talk to me on #userbase, and I’m pleased to say that severl people did.  We had a long conversation, at the end of which we decided that we must record our discussion in a shared document with a view to calling a meeting for anyone interested to discuss possible changes in UserBase.  We have not yet set a date, but it will probably be in a week or so.  I’ll make sure that the date is publicised.

In outline, we discussed the following:

* There is a lack of consistency of approach.  Many pages follow a common form, but several don’t.
* Currently there’s no obvious way of knowing how recently the page was written or edited.  Considering the rate of change in KDE 4, this is significant.
* A question was asked about the usefulness of a rating system, and its feasibility
* A number of applications were identified that currently have no entry
* Some new applications are strictly Qt, rather than KDE.  How should we deal with that?
* Some sort of visual tour, possibly video, was proposed as an introduction to KDE
* There is still no working solution to the problems that require access to the servers
* UserBase still lacks visibility.  It rarely gets picked up, for instance, in a google search, even though we may have an authoratative answer to a problem, while dubious mailing list answers are found.  Some suggestions for improving visibility were proposed.

I consider that some very useful exchanges of opinion and ideas were made, and I hope you’ll join us to discuss these and any other comments you have.  At the moment we are still using #userbase, but any day now we will be on #kde-userbase.  See you there!

Many people know me through my work with UserBase , where I’m a (the?) major contributor.  I’ve seen myself described as the UserBase maintainer. That’s in no way an official title but today that’s the hat I’m wearing.

UserBase has the potential to be a truly awesome resource, and if you look at some of the statistics it’s getting there.  782 content pages.  539 registered users.  Total views 1,387,442.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  But what about this statistic? – Users who have performed an action in the last 7 days 14! And when you look at the Special:ContributionScores you see that, taking out the excellent work being done by translators (Claus_chr, Yurchor, Qiii2006 and Alisha in particular) you can only conclude that there’s simply not much new content being added.  That’s a terrible shame, considering the cumulative knowledge of 539 registered users.

I’ve been worrying about this for some time, so when I saw a link to http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/ and found the heading “Know Your Team” I began to wonder just who is ‘my team’.  In truth, I know very little about most of the 539 people who have registered, so now it’s time to find out.  Why did you register?  What are your hopes, your expectations?  How can I help you become more involved?

I’ve talked to a few people when they identify a problem with which they would like help, but waiting for that to start a conversation just isn’t enough, so I’ve registered a new channel, #userbase, on Freenode.  I’ll be around most days, so I hope you’ll join me there.  Tell me about the applications you like to use.  Tell me your favourite features.  Tell me what you wanted to know and couldn’t find information about.  Tell me how we can make UserBase into a truly awesome beast.

I haven’t talked about UserBase for a while, but it’s still actively growing.  We now have 749 pages of content, not counting discussion pages.  I suspect that a lot of the recent growth is down to the efforts of Claus_chr, Qiii2006 and Yurchor, who have all been busily translating and they’ve recently been joined by Alisha and Caig.

The other good news is that we have had more than 1.33 million views of UserBase pages – something to be proud of.  We now have 500 registered users, but nowhere near that number actively contributing.  However, I’ve decided that from time to time I’ll publish the list of top 10 contributors.  So here is the first edition:

Over the last 7 days –
Score      Pages      Changes    Username
49           46            48               Claus chr
34           26            41               Alisha
30           23             37              Qiii2006
25           19             27              Yurchor
14           10            14               Annew
13             1            38               Hans
10             8              9               Caig
09             5              9               Membrive
07             4             6               The madman
01             1             1               ThorstenStaerk
01             1             1                Gdebure

Yes, I know that’s eleven, but it wouldn’t be fair to separate the last two.  An Overall Top Ten contribution list would contain mostly the same names.  You can see from the list above that it wouldn’t take much to get you into the week’s top ten.  Let’s see if the list is noticeably different next time I write.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of applications for which we have little or no information.  Let’s see whether, during October, we can complete the list of entries for the Applications/Internet section.  We need pages for Choqok, Blogilo, KRDC, Krfb, KVpnc, and Kdebluetooth.  If you are not confident with mediawiki markup and want help, you can find me (annew) on IRC most days.

Last month I was asked to jointly moderate the Office & Productivity forum, which of course has led to me spending more time in the forums than I had done previously.  I’ve never been a forum-lover, but I’m impressed with this forum.  It does seem much more pleasant and helpful than forums I’ve visited in the past.  I’ve been giving user support on mailing lists for several years, and for the first time I’m seriously thinking of leaving them.  After a year where I’ve watched general manners and behaviour deteriorate to downright rudeness it has, thankfully, quietened down.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that almost every distro-related list seems to be full of bike-shedding now.  There are few questions where I can help, and I wonder if I can justify the time given, for so little result.

One last thing – this week I have converted the desktops of two non-tech users to KDE 4.2.  They both use Mandriva, so I hope to get them on 4.3 next month, when Mandriva 2010 comes out.  One of the users is still on holiday, so I’ll have to wait for reaction there.  The other user just carried on using the same few apps as always, and apart from a small panic about where to find the shutdown button (his first look at kickoff, and didn’t immediately see that it was tabbed), had no reaction at all.  The other user is a little more demanding, so likely to have more questions.  The next couple of weeks should be interesting.

When I wrote my last blog, “When you have an itch to scratch….” (http://lydgate.org/blogs/?p=17) it was with a forlorn hope.  It seemed to me that my need was not a common one, so it was unlikely that anyone would be interested, particularly since I could give little or no information to help a project get started.  I should have had more faith in the world of FOSS.

Two people initially showed particular interest.  Purple-bobby did some interesting work to start off (http://purple-bobby.co.uk/JEFView/), but has not developed it further.  Maybe he didn’t have time or lost interest, or maybe I was just too slow in responding to him.  The other person was David Boddie, who started a python project that seems to have good potential.

Identifying the part of a .jef file that contains the stitch-out was the quick bit.  Once that was done, scaled display followed, using jef2png.py.  For that to be really useful, it was necessary to identify the colours used.  Between us, we have examined hundreds of patterns, and have identified almost every shade used in patterns. Hopefully the last handful will be found in the next week or so.  You can see the changelog at http://bitbucket.org/dboddie/python-showjef/overview/ .  David uses Mercurial, so it’s easy to keep up with his changes, and by downloading free JEF patterns from the web you can see his progress.  One caveat – we have found a few patterns that don’t use the colour-definitions that seem to be otherwise standard.  Until we find a common denominator it’s hard to do much about that.  The good news is that of my hundreds of stored patterns only three or four have this problem.

After all David’s work, it would be really nice if we could find a collaborator to turn this into a KDE-Other project.  Maybe now purple-bobby knows that we haven’t lost interest he might join us?  Maybe it’s just pricked your interest enough to talk about how this can be done.

We don’t have much in the way of hobby applications.  I’d like to see that addressed.  Wendy van Craen says she’d like to see someone working on a crochet pattern creator.  I know we have knitters among KDE contributors, and while the language of knitting varies enormously between countries, it’s not that hard to represent stitches in a kind of ascii art.  Something that could create and store modules for stitch patterns and combine them would be great.  KrossWordPuzzle 0.7.4 has just been announced, and how about creating some KrossNumberPuzzles?  What about koffice templates for gardeners?  Keeping track of plant collections, or tracking sowing, planting out, harvesting?  I can see possibilities for databases and for spreadsheet templates.  What other hobbies could we benefit?

So – hobbyist KDE section?  I think it is more than possible.

What do you do when you have an itch to scratch, and you can’t reach it? You get someone else to help. Yes, I have an itch that I’d dearly love to scratch, but I simply don’t have the skills. Here’s the problem.

I have an embroidery machine. When you buy such a machine it comes with some patterns installed in its memory. You then buy software that gives you more designs and allows you to modify designs. You won’t be surprised to hear that the software runs under Windows. In fact I have two software disks. The first installs and runs under wine, so is no real problem. The second uses a hardware dongle, and so far I’ve completely failed to get that to work with Linux. Most of the software on that second disk I can live without, but one facility it provides makes working so much easier – and this is where the itch starts.

You can buy additional patterns on the Internet – and I often do. Each pattern contains the instructions to the machine to embroider the design, but it also contains a thumbnail image. What I’d really like is to have a native Linux application that reads the image part from each file in a directory and displays them as a catalogue, rather like a Dolphin icon-view with previews enabled. In fact if it could be added into Dolphin I’d love it.

While what I can afford to pay would not pay the whole cost of development, there are possibilities for further income. There are about 10 different machine formats, but I suspect that the part of the pattern that describes the thumbnail will be the same in each one, so variations on the software could easily be made. If a developer also could write a Windows version I suspect that there would be a sale for that too – the disk I talked about earlier has some advanced machine programs and is thus very expensive. There are free examples of the machine formats on the Internet and I could help get it publicised on the web sites that sell patterns and in a machine-embroidery magazine.

If you fancy a break from your normal work, why not look at the design of the month at http://www.advanced-embroidery-designs.com/freedesign.html, particularly the JEF format, and see just how feasible this is?

Like everyone else, I find myself looking back over the year from my personal viewpoint.  It’s been a busy one.  Balancing the needs of four generations of family, a hobbyist club website, supporting KDE users on mailing lists, and developing UserBase has not always been easy.  From a KDE point of view, then, what have I achieved this year?

Six months ago the Community Working Group didn’t exist.  I became part of the initial group, and we started work immediately.  As a group we helped the community to define standards of behaviour that we, the KDE community, expected within the context of the community, resulting in a Code of Conduct being formulated and adopted.  Helping maintain those standards has, as expected, not been onerous, yet it remains important.

As the year moved on it was a pleasant surprise when a developer turned to us for practical help, in a way that none of us had envisaged.  He was pleased with the result, saying that it had helped his project, and we got the gratification of a positive feedback.

My work on giving support through mailing lists tends to be a more isolated role, and this year has been a hard one.  There was a lot of unpleasantness from users who choose to use bleeding edge distros, but at the same time did not want to adopt new ways of doing anything.  This persisted from spring, well into autumn.  The last few weeks, though, have brought a gradual shift in attitudes.  Life has been made easier by one or two people enjoying KDE 4 enough to start to help me in fielding queries.  “Over my dead body” attitudes do still exist, but there has been a growth of grudging, “Might as well give it a try”, resulting in genuine questions about adapting.  Much of it is fairly routine, being what most people first struggle with, but some of it highly technical as the user in question has very specific needs.  Thankfully the KDE developer community has been very helpful to me in resolving the issues that are way outside of my experience.

Then there is UserBase.  We started by moving user-centric pages from TechBase to UserBase, and built on them.  Jucato introduced a structure and design, and the number of pages grows almost daily, now totalling around 210.  I’m pleased with what has been achieved so far, but concerned that things have slowed down so much.  The reasons for this are several, and very real, so let’s think about the future.  What exactly do we need for UserBase to continue to develop?

Statistics tell us that we have 40 registered users, but only 6-8 people are actually contributing regularly.  There are several levels of contribution needed, from time-consuming to dropping in from time to time.  Let’s look at some of those needs.

Is English not your first language?  If that’s so, could you translate a few pages, not just the one that is nearest to your field of interest?  There are no deadlines here, but it would be nice to see a steady growth of “other language” pages.

There are still too many applications that don’t have a UserBase page at all.  http://userbase.kde.org/Applications/Development illustrates this admirably.  I’m not a developer and I don’t use those tools.  At a pinch I could rustle up a few lines from available old web pages, but it wouldn’t do justice to the hard work put in to make those applications what they are.  We really need developers who use the tools to help get those spaces filled.

Talking of developers and documentation, let’s think for a moment about the debate as to whether project web pages should stand alone or be included in UserBase.  As I’ve stated many times, I think there is a place for both, but where the developers decide to keep their own web pages, I’d ask them to either update UserBase pages or to ask the CWG (or email me personally) to update them when significant changes are needed.  The last thing any of us want is outdated information, giving a totally wrong impression.

I still dream of getting hundreds of users to add Hints and Tips for the various applications, but I have to accept that this won’t happen for a while.  People have to get ‘settled in’ and feel really comfortable with the new applications and new versions before we will get a ‘Hey, have you seen this?’ type of contribution.  I haven’t lost faith, though.  I still think it can happen.

One other need I’d like to mention.  From time to time we get ideas and suggestions that we can’t carry out because we don’t have the webdev/php skills.  We really need one or more maintainers – preferrably a small team, to spread the load, which in itself shouldn’t be too heavy.  I can’t see a continuous demand situation, and it would rarely matter if someone said “I’ll do that for you, but not this week/month”.  Sometimes all it would really need is to listen to what we want then tell us why it’s a really bad idea, and that we should think again!

So what will 2009 bring?  More of the same?  Yes and no.  I’m enjoying seeing the first snowdrop shoots of user interest, and I believe the negatives will mostly fade away in 2009, so user support should become enjoyable again.  I believe UserBase has a great future – we just need to keep working on it.  As for the CWG, if you haven’t noticed us doing anything, that’s good news.  We’re here if you think we can help, whatever the scenario.  If you don’t need us, we just go on working on our own interests.  Yes, 2009 is going to be a good year!

See you in Gran Canaria!

annew

Hi – I’m Anne,a.k.a. annew.  I live in Yorkshire, England, in the Pennine hills, which are very beautiful when the sun shines – which is not often enough!  I spend all my spare time, and a lot that isn’t spare, working with KDE.  I’ve been giving and receiving help on mailing lists since 2002, and now am devoting most of my time to helping UserBase get off the ground.

So where has UserBase got to?  It’s hard to believe that it is only 6 days since “UserBase goes Live!” was posted.  We now have 127 pages of content, and the number grows daily.  We have 40 registered contributors – not bad for 1 week, but we need lots more.  It is possible to edit without logging in, but there is one big disadvantage.  We can’t leave messages for you.  While Talk:UserName pages are not private and protected, they are less likely to be read by others than the Discussion pages attached to content pages.  No-one is forcing you to create a login, but it does aid communication.

What will make it more useful for users?  At the moment the first thing that users will notice is that they can get a very quick overview of what applications KDE offers.  It may well be that we’ve missed some of the lesser known ones – now’s the time to add them and get them better known.

Application pages generally consist of an overview of the features, with a screenshot or two, and links to the project’s home page.  All very good, as a starter, but not good enough.  What we really need is a FAQs, Hints and Tips section for every one of those pages.  If every KDE user added just one tip or one helpful screenshot, can you imagine what a resource that would make?

So is UserBase only to be a help to users?  I hope not.  UserBase is the perfect place to keep in touch with your project’s users.  Set a Watch on the pages that you are concerned with.  Use the Discussion pages attached to them to make suggestions.  If users post a question on a Discussion page, you can either answer it there or add it to the FAQ section for the project.

Developers – we don’t want to add any burden, so tell us how we can help you.  Users, tell us what you need and can’t easily find. There have been 52,763 page views so far – let’s make UserBase really work for everyone.