Documentation

Top 50 technical writers on the web + Xfce and Xubuntu doc updates

This site lists who they’ve identified as the top 50 technical writers on the web, which I stumbled upon via a link from Scott Nesbitt’s blog.  While this list will certainly provide me with additional documentation resources, I notice a dearth of open-source documentation names in that list.  No Shaun McCance, no Emma Jane Hogbin, [...]

Apt-urls – Now available on the Ubuntu wiki

Good news on the wiki front.  : -)  As of this morning, apt-urls are enabled on the Ubuntu Wiki.  What does this mean?  In simple terms, this feature provides a simple, wiki-based interface for apt, the base of our software management system.  It means that we can now insert clickable links on the wiki that [...]

At the documentation conference

I’m attending the WritersUA conference in Seattle this week, and yesterday was day one of the conference.  The conference started with Scott McCloud talking about how he created his Google Chrome comic, and I attended other talks on ISO documentation standards, as well as architecting your content so it can be reused. McCloud’s talk was [...]

Making Strides Toward Xubuntu 9.04

As I’m sure is the case with other Ubuntu-related development groups, the Xubuntu team has been quite active as of late.  We spent some time this weekend testing out configurations of system settings now that we have migrated to Xfce 4.6 for the 9.04 release, and have completed the transition to the new artwork for [...]

Xubuntu News

The Xubuntu documentation for 8.04 is done, and the doc-centered folks are now working on updating the wiki.  There are still quite a few holes in it for now, but we’re working fairly quickly.  I like the new menu bar.  It makes it easy to get around. Also, I know it’s not much notice, but [...]

Packaging: it might be helpful – even for documentors

Fellow Chicagolander, nixternal, provided the Ubuntu-Chicago local community team with a few links to packaging-related articles that are available from some Debian and Kubuntu websites: 1) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy 2) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#devref 3) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#maint-guide 4) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide 5) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PbuilderHowto 6) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide/Lists/DocumentationResources He sent them out to the mailing list in advance of a packaging session that’s being held this [...]

Room for Improvement

Both this article and this article note how Ubuntu’s documentation needs to be better than it is. The first article describes (in the last point on the second page) that we should do more content scraping from the unofficial documentation (with permission) to improve our docs. We receive lots of requests for mentorship, so there [...]