Re: Mallard Article for Gnome Journal

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 09:59 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 09:57 +0100, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> > Hey Shaun,
> > 
> > 2010/2/10 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> > >
> > > I'd like to get some community feedback on what topics
> > > people think should be addressed in the article.
> > 
> > Why not a tutorial or some kind of article, describing how
> > third-parties, ISVs, downstreams, can plug their own modifications to
> > the help of a program?
> > I don't know if this kind of article would suit GJ, but it could be
> > really interesting to showcase how it is easy to provide updated
> > documentation based on personal modifications or patches to a program.
> > Interesting could also be to provide a supposed workflow on how to
> > deal with writing a new topic/page, how to test it and validate it,
> > and how to deal with translations. A plus: how to provide a separate
> > package to update only the help.
> > 
> > I don't know... just throwing there ideas...
> > 
> > Ciao.
> > 
> 
> I think there may be an opportunity for 2 different articles.  When I
> first pinged Shaun about a possible article, my thought was more of an
> overview of Mallard, including:
> 
> * How did it start?  What drove Shaun to create a new language from
> scratch?
> * Why?
> * What are the benefits? (Maybe users vs. developers?)
> * Where are we with Mallard?
> * Where are we going?  What can users expect in the future around GNOME
> Help?
> 
> My thought would be to do more of an introduction type article, and then
> (assuming someone like Shaun) could follow it up up in the next edition
> of GJ with a tutorial type article.  (And I'm hopeful either article has
> a blurb about why in-application topic based help is so important).  One
> side benefit of having more than one article is keeping Mallard in the
> news more too.

Ooh, a follow-up article!

So what I was thinking for the article was to show small
snippets of markup, to give people a sense of what I'm
talking about, but not to go too in-depth on details in
the article itself.

People who want more in-depth information can view the
tutorials on projectmallard.org.  And I would link to
relevant tutorials from the article whenever possible.

Of course, that means that relevant tutorials have to
be written.  So the GJ article isn't just a way to get
more exposure for Mallard.  It's also a way to prod me
into writing more tutorials.  Everybody wins.


-- 
Shaun McCance
http://syllogist.net/