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Showing posts from July, 2022

Modern Web Applications

This article describes  modern web applications including single-page apps, microapps. web services. and responsive web design. View publication

Planning and Delivering Agile Documents

The impact on documentation when project teams adopt agile practices to plan and deliver products and services. View publication

Liferay Community Edition (Liferay)

Contributor to the open source collaboration between Sun Microsystems and Liferay on the Liferay Community Edition  portal software ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/lportal/ ) that combines efforts and technologies from both companies to enhance and maintain web aggregation and presentation technologies. View Publication

If A Tree Falls In The Forest (Liferay)

I wrote my first blog about my issues with blogs and wikis (specifically blogging to arouse user interest in an early draft of an article). So...after a full month of revisions incorporating feedback from the project team after first posting my article to the wiki, I think the content is now "complete" (or at least it incorporates everything that everyone on the team can think of). Then comes the deafening silence of no responses from the Liferay community...kind of like that saying "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" At first, I’m more than a little discouraged, because wikis (such as the  Liferay Community Edition)   are supposed to be this wave of the future that will bring about the age of collaborative documentation and forever break down the walls between professional technical communicators and the user community But perhaps I’m just being skeptical--it took 20 years before desktop publishing moved from the

It's Not What You Say But How You Say It (Liferay)

I haven’t gotten any feedback on the articles that I posted have posted. But, just for argument\"s sake, I do get comments from users just after I start a review draft of the product documentation (which are based on the wiki articles). Do I incorporate the user comments as part of the product documentation as I would review feedback from the project team? Or should I just collect the user comments and have the product team review them for completeness and accuracy (as is done with bug reports)? In other words, should blog posts on  an open source project be considered as complete and accurate when the product documentation is available separately? Or, more to the point, can a blogreplace the need for separate product documentation? My past experience working on open source documentation projects is that, while blogs are a valuable opportunity to solicit feedback, they cannot replace the need for dedicated writers to create the required task, reference, and conceptual documentatio

Not Ready For Prime Time (Liferay)

So, I post to the Liferay community wiki an early draft of an article that is barely more than topic sentences with no real detail. Then I get the edict to post a blog to the community to encourage feedback. I thought my blog was pretty innocuous, until the one of the project engineers and the engineering manager realize that I’m blogging about features that really aren’t ready, and that the community would have little interest in providing input and feedback. So, after I had (unsuccessfully) spent two weeks of asking the engineers for feedback on the article before I first posted, I managed to get enough additional detail to post a revised draft that may have enough content to actually pique the interest of the community and actually get feedback. So, the process of collaborating with the community on open source documentation is somewhat hindered by the fact that evangelism of the community often occurs at the same time (to drum up support). It seems to me like a situation of putting