Presentation in Mountain View tomorrow (Thurs)

[Craig Muth]

The Xiki presentation at the Silicon Valley Bleeding Edge Ruby group
is tomorrow:

http://www.meetup.com/ruby-100/events/48792432/

It's going to be a bit longer than the last. Probably 45 minutes or
more. To keep it lively I'm going to let the audience pick the topics
as we go along (after a 10 minute intro).

--Craig

[Paul Baker]

Heres hoping there will be a screencast for those of us out of the Cali area :)

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[Craig Muth]

> Heres hoping there will be a screencast for those of us out of the Cali area :)

I was thinking of making a bunch of smaller screencasts to cover it.
I've kind of been admiring the format at
http://wardcunningham.github.com (a bunch of small informal videos).

Does that seem cool (vs longer screencasts)?

I'd post them here and email this list when I do:

http://xiki.org/screencasts

--Craig

[Paul Baker]

My Two Cents: Yeah shorter targeted videos are definitely better IMHO. I like the view that you used for the SF Xiki Presentation (very Khan Academy) over the wardcunningham videos. 

Any thoughts on a dedicated Xiki.org YouTube channel (over your personal YouTube channel)? Also, I don't have a ton of time to write code ATM (working on some other projects), but I'm going to start messing around with Xiki soon. Anyway to help with documentation/ tutorials? Wiki @xiki.org perhaps? (LOL http://wiki.xiki.org... it's just fun to say :)

[Craig Muth]

Sorry for the delayed reply...

> My Two Cents: Yeah shorter targeted videos are definitely better IMHO. I
> like the view that you used for the SF Xiki Presentation (very Khan
> Academy) over the wardcunningham videos.

Great feedback. I'll probably stick to that.

> Any thoughts on a dedicated Xiki.org YouTube channel (over your personal
> YouTube channel)?

There is one, but I can't recover my password for it. They make you
enter the email address you used and I'm not sure what it is.

> (working on some other projects), but I'm going to start messing around with
> Xiki soon.

Great!

> Anyway to help with documentation/ tutorials?

Yeah, that would be fantastic. The install for Xiki is a bit rough at
the moment, so if you run into issues installing and you think of
improvements to the docs or the install process itself, be sure to
pass it along. Sending suggestions to this list is a good way to
start.

> Wiki @xiki.org perhaps?

I've had a few ideas about ways do documentation. My latest thoughts:

While in xiki, it would be cool if, on any blank line, you could just
type a few words related to what you're tring to do, and double-click
on it to get help / documentation. Then a menu could pop up guiding
you in the right direction. For example, if you're looking for
documentation about running shell commands, if you type "shell" and
double-click, it expands to "shell commands" and redirects you to the
@console menu:

shell commands/
<< console/

When you double-click on it, you can see if any of the menu items are
what you want, or expand the "docs/" menu (a convention I've been
using) to see descriptions and examples you can double-click on.

console/
- log/
- tree/
- api/
- docs/
> Overview
| You can run shell commands by typing things like this:
|
| In current dir.
@ $ ls
|
| In other dir.
@ /tmp/
$ ls
...

Many of the docs/ menus point have "See Also" sections that point to
other similar menus.

I've been building up the docs/ menus over time. If I type something
I think people might reasonably type and there's no menu for it, I
just type what I think the menu should look like (often it just
redirects to another menu) and type as+menu (Ctrl-a Ctrl_m) to save
it.

I'll do a screencast on this soon.

Also, re docs...

I've committed the initial versions of the short screencasts to
https://github.com/trogdoro/xiki/tree/master/etc/screencasts. As I
create them, I'll commit the finished versions. That way, people can
refer to them, as well as use them to demo xiki to other people.

> (LOL http://wiki.xiki.org... it's just fun to say :)

:)

--Craig

[Paul Baker]

Cool. I'm working on a pretty big project that should finish up by the end of this week. I'll go through the install process Monday (hopefully) and respond if I have any questions. I like the idea of having the documentation in the Xiki. However, might it also be useful to have it online? I think this for two main reasons: 

1. It'll help gain exposure to the project if you have it online being crawled. Right now "xiki" or "xiki help" don't pull a whole lot of relevant results (except for the main site). "xiki installation" doesn't pull any relevant results. A wiki of help documentation would be a step towards solving that. 
2. While in app documentation is really useful and important. It is also nice to be able to get a bigger picture view of an app by reviewing its documentation. I'm primarily a SQL developer and I still find myself just scanning help pages and doing Google searches of the MSDN online library whenever I am trying to do something I'm unsure of. 

I think what would be best is if there was a way to keep the Xiki in app documentation sync'd with an online copy. I'll need to start working with the tool and the documentation. I'm not saying that an online repository is a critical priority atm, I'm just thinking that it's probably something to consider for the not too distant future and if so, then it might be a good idea to plan today's documentation tasks accordingly.