Improving visibility of clojure-doc.org

[Michael Klishin]

Started in October 2012, http://clojure-doc.org is a pretty extensive

community documentation effort. It covers Clojure, its ecosystem

and tools and has two key goals:

 * We produce beginner-friendly content

 * It is dead easy to join and help

Even though recently that hasn't been

as much activity as in the past, it is not abandoned and continues

to accumulate useful, beginner-friendly material.

We constantly get praises from newcomers to Clojure who discover

clojure-doc.org. Unfortunately, it does not appear even in top 10

in Google for "clojure docs" or "clojure documentation" and

many community members are not aware of it.

In part it is less visible because we no longer actively post

progress reports. Things have settled down and most of changes

now are small edits and improvements all over the place. It is

a bit pointless to post progress reports more often than

once a month or so.

So I'd like to start a discussion about what can be done about it.

The community (we have 40 contributors) has worked very hard

on clojure-doc.org and I'd like to see high profile resources

(namly clojure.org and leiningen.org) link to it. What would

it take to convince clojure.org maintainers to do so?

There are still guides left ot be written (macros, gen-class),

but overall, I'd say there is no better source of freely available,

beginner-friendly, hackable (no Clojure CA, everything is developed

on GitHub [1], content is in Markdown) documentation. All it needs

is some linking and promotion love.

One way to help would be to start a campaign such as Mozilla's

Promote JS [docs]. Unfortunately, unlike Mozilla key contributors

behind clojure-doc.org largely lack graphic and Web design skills,

so replicating that campaing is probably not an option.

Do you have any ideas about how we can make clojure-doc.org more

visible? Do you know who can help with getting a link from clojure.org?

Do you think clojure-doc.org is not good enough to be the "blessed"

open source documentation resource? Please post your suggestions

and concerns.

Improving CDS visibility will benefit the entire community plus all the people who will join it in the future. Most of the work is already done,

it just needs to be promoted better.

Thanks you.

1. https://github.com/clojuredocs/cds

--
MK

http://github.com/michaelklishin
http://twitter.com/michaelklishin

[Sean Corfield]

FWIW, I've added a permanent link to clojure-doc.org from my blog with
the link text Clojure Documentation - perhaps others who have blogs
could do the same?

I was looking at meetup.com to see if I could easily find a way to add
resources / links to a group's home page, thinking it would be a good
link to have there (Bay Area Clojure User Group). Anyone know enough
about meetup.com to point me in the right direction there?

Sean

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--
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/
World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/

"Perfection is the enemy of the good."
-- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880)

[Alex Miller]

I've updated http://clojure.org/documentation to add a link to http://clojure-doc.org. I think it's a great resource for all Clojure developers!! 

I think it would be useful in your regular updates to highlight areas that could use help. Another area that I think would be useful in addition to the current docs are smallish examples of full projects that highlight how to put the existing pieces together into a (small) real project.

Alex

--

[Daniel Glauser]

I added a link to http://clojure-doc.org in both the group discussion and the about page for the Den of Clojure (http://www.meetup.com/denofclojure/). Sean (or anyone else for that matter) is there an easy way we can let the rest of the user group to lend a hand? Is there a better place to post the link on the meetup site?

Daniel

[Phil Hagelberg]

Devin Walters writes:

> I assume this has been discussed to death already, but isn't there some way
> to get clojure-doc and clojuredocs to live under the same umbrella?

I believe this is the plan; it's just blocked on not having the manpower
to port clojuredocs.org's web UI off Rails and build a Clojure HTML
interface for it.

Volunteers welcome.

-Phil