Re: Documentation tool proposal

[Anirudh <anirudh anirudhsanjeev org>]

Hi Shaun,

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> The site isn't up yet. When will it be available?
My VPS Hosting expired a little while ago and I will have it back up
in a few weeks when I have a version ready which works properly. I'm
rewriting the REST server in a format which makes it easier to unit
test. Plus I'm a little strapped for funds right now :). I haven't put
up my source code on git yet, it was just available as a tarball and
wiki on the website till now.

> I agree with Phil that a screenshot-based system can't replace
> our topic-oriented help, but I do think there are places where
> visual walkthroughs are useful.
I feel so too. The whole goal of this wasn't to replace topic-oriented
help but to crowd-source writing tutorials, similar to how wikihow
does it, and similar to how instructables.com does it, except only for
desktop support.

A lot of people want to share instructions for doing little things.
What I'm exactly targeting is this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=100, and trying to make it
a lot more easier to do. After poking around yelp sufficiently I
realized that tuxtorial isn't the tool for the job.

> But I can't really comment on
> a tool that I can't download and test.
I understand. I'm doing some refactoring to replace the hackish
XML-RPC backend with a REST based one. Moreover, there isn't a GUI
right now, it's a purely console application which doesn't have any
image editing capabilities at this stage. I have to focus on getting a
usable alpha working, but I tend to get distracted by adding fancy
little features like ability to have multiple languages for a single
tutorial, mallard markup, etc.

I'm a little busy with trying to apply for GSoc right now, but the
moment I'll have anything worth showing, I'll let you folks know about
it.

Thanks,
Anirudh