I’m at the GNOME documentation hackfest in Brno, Czech Republic, and we’ve been updating help for GNOME platform and applications in advance of GNOME 3.4.

As part of the event, we’ve been reviewing our use of the Mallard syntax, making sure that we’re getting the most out of some of the new features. One newer feature in Mallard allows users to expand or hide portions of the help as needed. This helps users can more easily scan through possible topics, and to open the ones that are relevant to them. It also has the added benefit of saving space on the screen. This feature is in an experimental namespace for now, but we’re please enough with the results, and it is likely to be moved into the primary schema shortly. It will be in limited use in our help releases for the 3.4 cycle.

Here’s a brief example of what this looks like in action (note: you might need to view the page directly rather than through a feed aggregator if you want to see the video):

Also, here’s a portion of the code that makes it work. All that’s required is a the “ui:expanded” attribute on the appropriate element. It accepts values of “yes” and “no.”

<table rules="rows" frame="top bottom" ui:expanded="yes">
  <title>Tab-related Shortcut keys</title>
    <thead>
      <tr>
        <td><p>To Do This</p></td>  <td><p>Press This</p></td>  
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
      <tr>
        <td><p>Switch to the next tab to the left</p></td> <td><p>Ctrl + Alt + PageUp</p></td>  
      </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

It’s possible to use this attribute on any element that contains a title, so you have the ability to use it on tables (as I’ve done here), lists, steps, or even entire sections. Thus far we’ve only used them on tables, and the style rules have yet to be ironed out.

The hackfest has been good thus far, but we still have much to do over the next couple of days. I am focusing on some updates to GNOME user docs, as well as writing new docs for Seahorse Encryption Manager, Rhythmbox, and am doing some GNOME docs team wiki work. Florian Nadge and Petr Kovar of Red Hat have been more than gracious as hosts, and the food on Brno is plenty meaty. Plus, there is cheap beer.

Of course the food and drink is even less expensive when Shaun McCance of Syllogist.net sponsors a dinner for us (thanks, Shaun!). Many thanks, as well, go to the GNOME Foundation for their sponsorship of our travel and accommodations.

As I mentioned in a recent post, gedit snippets can help you write code more quickly, and with fewer errors, than writing all of your code manually. Snippets work by expanding small chunks of text into complete combinations of code boilerplate and variable/attribute placeholders. Using these pre-configured combinations of boilerplate and placeholders frees you to focus on the bits of code and text that are materially relevant to your work at hand.

You can enable the gedit snippets plugin by selecting Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Snippets.

There are four components to using snippets: confirming the language or syntax setting, entering the snippet ID, activating the snippet, and completing the snippet by entering the appropriate attributes or variables into the placeholder text areas.

The first thing is to make sure that the file type is set to correspond with the type of file you’re working on. If you’re starting from an existing file, gedit will attempt to set the file type for you automatically. If you’re starting a brand new file, or if gedit hasn’t correctly identified the file type, you can also manually set or change the file type.

Once you have that in place, the most difficult part is actually remembering the snippets that are available. You can view, edit, and create snipppets using the Manage Snippets window (see Tools > Manage Snippets). Once you know the relevant snippet IDs, all you need to do is type a snippet ID, and press the tab key. The tab key is what activates the snippet.

After you press the tab key, gedit converts that brief snippet of text into a combination of boilerplate text and appropriate variable or attribute placeholders. Pressing the tab key again will move the cursor to the next placeholder area.

Here’s an example. I’m starting from a blank page, and am writing a new Mallard XML file. The snippet ID to start a new Mallard page file is just the word, “page.”

Simple enough! Just enter the snippet ID, press the tab key, watch as gedit inserts the boilerplate text, and then use the tab key to maneuver through the placeholder areas.

There are currently snippets for numerous languages and syntaxes, but coverage of each language varies, and some snippets may not include the most recent language features. Give gedit snippets a try. If you don’t see a snippet feature that you’d like to use, file a bug in the gedit bug tracker.

I’ve been maintaining the gedit documentation since the run-up to the gedit 3.0 release, and doing so has helped me to get to know some of the ins-and-outs of the program. What can I say, it’s one of the perks of writing documentation – you get to know the software that you’re documenting.

With that, though, I thought I’d pass along some of the basic configurations that help me to write documentation more quickly, and in a more consistently-formatted way.

Here’s a quick run-down of some settings that you may find helpful:

View Preferences – Edit > Preferences > View:

• Check the following items:
• Display line numbers (this helps with locating validation errors)
• Display right margin at column (80 characters) (breaking lines at 80 characters makes diffs look prettier)
• Highlight the current line
• Highlight matching brackets (optional: I don’t use this feature, but some people prefer it)
• Uncheck:
• Enable text wrapping (not needed if you’re breaking lines at 80 characters)

Editor Preferences: Edit > Preferences > Editor

• Tab Width: 2
• Check
• Insert spaces instead of tabs
• Enable automatic indentation
• Uncheck
• Create a backup copy of files before saving (not needed if you’re using revision control, like git or bzr)

With regards to plugins, I recommend enabling the dashboard plugin (which will be available as part of gedit 3.4, included in Ubuntu 12.04, Fedora 17, OpenSUSE 12.2, etc.), and the gedit snippets plugin. In the near future I’ll be writing up a post about using gedit snippets.

One other neat feature that I often use with gedit is the keyboard shortcut for moving a line up or down within the text. If you position your mouse cursor on any point in a line, and then press Alt + Up Arrow, it will move the entirety of that line up within the text. Pressing Alt + Down Arrow will move that line down within the text. Simple enough! (The complete list of gedit shortcut keys is available in the user help, by the way. Just open up gedit and press F1.)

Do you have any suggestions or tips for using gedit to write documentation? If so, I’d appreciate you sharing them with me in the comments.

With both a two-day conference and a three-day sprint, the Open Help Conference made for a busy week, but I must say that it was a success. We had people there from Gnome, Mozilla, OpenStack, Red Hat, BSD, as well as people who were interested in learning about open-source help. Everyone had something to share.

Some of our discussions may bubble-up as other blog posts, but a couple of the presentations and discussions made me think more about engaging users where they are. They made me think of how we can do more to extended help to people who use our software in the places that they go, rather than just requiring them to seek-out help from our help platform.

Twitter as a support tool
For example, one topic that we discussed was using Twitter as a support platform. Jennifer Zickerman demonstrated Mozilla’s Twitter-based “Army of Awesome” as a facilitator for user-to-user support. It’s pretty cool that Mozilla opens up their support channels in this way — users help other users directly, and you only need a Twitter account to help out. Although you can’t always solve a problem in 140 characters, it’s easy to point someone to a support article or to suggest other help resources. In a less formal way, I’ve also seen members of the Mozilla documentation team use Twitter to request a technical review of new help articles, or to remind people about documentation-related events (e.g., reminders for Mozilla’s Wiki Wednesday events).

Stack Exchange sites: Likes and dislikes
Another approach that we talked about were the various Stack Exchange sites. In talking about this, we liked how good answers rise to the top (as opposed to regular user forums where you may need to scroll through rows of posts to find a solution to a problem) and the gamefulness of the sites. We also liked that user questions and responses are available for download in XML format under a CC-by-SA license (albeit with fairly stringent attribution requirements). In particular, the XML downloads of user questions will allow documentation contributors to see what questions users are really asking, and what questions are occur frequently.

This being an open help conference, some of us did note that the back-end for any Stack Exchange site is proprietary, and discussed the network-effect of how using closed-source tools encourages more people to use to closed-source tools. Yes, Stack Exchange sites are “free-as-in-beer” to the people who use them, but we discussed both OSQA (GPL-licensed) and Shapado (AGPLv3-licensed) as open-source alternatives that would be worth considering for similar help-site deployments. Someone also mentioned that Reddit (which isn’t necessarily a help platform, but is open-source software) is a popular area where people can post questions or comments that are related specifically to Gnome or Ubuntu.

Using blogs and planets to recruit writers
Aside from Twitter-based tools and Stack Exchange sites, some other ways of seeking out users are less centralized. Two items I took away from Anne Gentle’s talk were that she is not shy about asking bloggers to repurpose their blog posts for use in the official documentation, and she also recruits people who post to the OpenStack Planet to help write documentation. These approaches seem especially helpful when writing documentation for very technical and complex projects. In some areas, the help author may not have the deep domain expertise needed to write docs for bleeding-edge software.

Other possibilities, and the remaining need for good docs
One project that I’m curious to know more about is the Mozilla Sumo project. I wish that members of their team had been able to join us. Sumo seems like a well-rounded platform for gathering user contributions to official documentation, while still allowing for editorial review and for document translations.

Even with all of this in mind, though, I still see strong, centralized documentation as very important. After all, it can save a lot of time if a user can find good docs in one central spot, and even Google isn’t helpful if no one has documented a well-researched solution to a problem. These discussions reminded me that it’s also important to interact with users where they are, though. If you have ideas for other ways to interact with users where they are, or know of something that has worked well for you, feel free to share any suggestions in the comments.

I’m in Cincinnati in advance of the Open Help Conference, an event organized around open source docs, and the building of community documentation efforts in commercial projects. The conference will kick-off this evening with a social event, and will continue (with both the conference and post-conference docs hackfests) through Wednesday.

The event has some great speakers lined up, with speakers from Mozilla, Red Hat, BSD, GE, and others. Scott Nesbitt from DMN Communications will also be here. I’m looking forward to interacting with everyone, and am especially looking forward to talking shop with Anne Gentle. Anne works as the “Content Stacker” (aka documentation lead) for OpenStack. OpenStack shares our Launchpad infrastructure, so it will be great to find ways to collaborate with her and the other OpenStack doc contributors.

I will provide a few updates on the conference over the weekend on my blog, but you can also get some updates by following the #openhelp hashtag on both twitter and identi.ca.

I’m looking forward to a great weekend.

Just a quick note to let people know that we’re holding an Ubuntu Documentation Team meeting tomorrow, Sunday, May 29th, at 20:00 UTC. When is 20:00 UTC? Here is how to figure it out:

1. It’s easy (Yes, step one is, “It’s easy.”)
2. Click on this fancy link.
3. Look through the list of cities and find a city that is in the same time zone as where you will be on Sunday.
4. When you find a city such a city, look at the time that is listed next to it.

That will be the time of the meeting! You can join us in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on the freenode IRC network at that time, and we’ll have our meeting. We have a lot to cover, but we’ll prioritize things so that we only meet for an hour.

The focus of the meeting will be on the documentation team strategy document, as well as confirming our goals for the 11.10 release.

Hope to see you there!

Here’s a few pictures from UDS:

Saying goodbye to Matt Zimmerman at the UDS opening keynote. It took me until Friday to thank Matt for his advocacy around women’s issues, as well as LGBT and gender issues. There aren’t many people in positions such as his who do so, so many thanks, Matt. Best of luck to you.

Jani Monoses and and Charlie Kravetz, the past and present leaders of the Xubuntu project. (Missing in this photo is Cody Somerville, who headed up Xubuntu in between the two pictured here. Also missing is Lionel Le Folgoc, who was surely off packaging software somewhere in France.)

The hotel’s grand ballroom, with the one and only Micah Gersten (micahg) in the foreground. He makes us all feel more secure when he’s around.

The bridge on the Danube at night. We had a lot of fun walking around and taking pictures that night.

Me giving a thumbs-up to the trip while going down one of the super-escalators to the train platform. (Credit to Lyz Krumbach for this photo – CC by SA 3.0 ftw).

More pictures (some of them fuzzy!) can be found on my Picasa page. Many thanks to Canonical for sponsoring my airfare and accommodations on this trip.

Now that my week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit is over, and I have completed my safe flight back, I thought I would write up a blog post about my experience while I complete my recovery from jet lag.

My week at UDS was a challenging week. A great week. A week in which I had great discussions around docs, met lots of cool people, and wound up expanding the limits of what are normally considered acceptable sleep patterns.

I had three docs-team sessions during the week. I also attended two sessions about cloud-related documentation, and another session on server documentation. The three docs-team sessions focused on the team strategy, our goals for the 11.10 release cycle, and evaluating a web-based documentation platform.

Team Strategy

The inspiration for the team strategy discussion is the Xubuntu Strategy Document. Have you read it? When Cody Somerville first wrote it, part of me was like, “Are you serious? Did you write this yourself?” It seemed too complicated. In practice, though, I’ve seen the Xubuntu team reference that document while making decisions time and time again. I think a similar document would benefit the docs team, too. I’m preparing a draft document based off of recent team discussions, and will be sharing it in the next week.

Team Goals for the 11.10 Release

The team goals session was pretty great. People in the room, and people listening in via the audio casts, gave helpful input. There was more focus on the Ubuntu wiki at UDS than I anticipated. Some of our goals for this cycle include creating a strategy document, contributing to upstream docs projects, refactoring our team wiki, testing of documentation accessibility, testing a preferred help layout, doing stable release updates for docs and translations, squashing boogs, adopting a consistent coding style, updating our style guide (or picking an existing one), and doing some of the initial work in revamping help.ubuntu.com.

It sounds like a lot, and it is, but some of it is already a work in progress. We will make these goals explicit during our next team meeting.

Web-based Documentation Platform

The group behind this project is Pronovix, a Drupal consultancy. I knew that their project was using Drupal and DITA, but I wasn’t sure what *their project did*. They had some of their staff based in Hungary, just a short trip away from Budapest, so I thought it was worth getting in touch to learn more about their approach and how it might benefit us.

DITA stands for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML syntax developed by IBM that specializes in content profiling and content reuse. The advantage of content reuse with a tool like DITA is that it allows you to write something once, write it well, and reuse it most everywhere. That is the idea, at least. Implementation of DITA can be difficult. Their project has promise, but the toolchain isn’t currently packaged by any distro other than OpenSUSE. Harald Sitter (Mr. Apache Log File) felt that this very much limits the likelihood of upstream adoption.

Even with that in mind, we are going to seriously evaluate their platform. It was very considerate of this group to make a trip to demonstrate their project, and we want to be supportive of everyone who is working in open source documentation.

There are quite a few irons in our fire, and we’ll have to get word out about our activities somehow. Our progress will likely be presented via a new Ubuntu Documentation Team blog. We think now is a good time to start one up, so look for more info on that soon, as well.

Trying to write documentation for both Gnome 3 and Ubuntu 11.04 had many of the documentation contributors a bit strapped for time, but we are making progress on user help for 11.04.

Here is a quick peek at what we are doing:

Click to play

This is all done with Mallard and Yelp.

KDE, you can have this, too. Talk with Shaun McCance. Shaun has revamped the back-end of yelp so that it wouldn’t be crazily difficult to put a Qt front-end on it.

Just imagine it . . . You could call it “kelp.”

As for the docs, there is still much more to be done. Join us on #ubuntu-doc on IRC, or join the Ubuntu Documentation team mailing list to see how you can help out.

Although I’ve primarily worked on Xubuntu documentation in the past, this cycle has seen me contribute quite a bit to gedit documentation. Unfortunately, I’ve asked, and the gedit team isn’t going to be making an additional release for the 2.3x branch, so these updates won’t be included in Ubuntu 11.04. : /

Update: I’ve spoken with another gedit developer, and have been given the ok to get the 2.3x docs updated once the 3.0 docs are ready. Obviously, 3.0 is the priority, but I will make this happen for Ubuntu + OpenSUSE. : )

For now, though, I’m at the Gnome 3 documentation hackfest with Phil Bull, Shaun McCance, Johannes Schmid, Tiffany Antopolski, Natalia Ruz, and Germán Póo-Caamaño. Scott Nesbitt of DMN Communications and Words on a Page fame plans to stop by over the weekend, and Ryan Lortie has been playing the part of gracious local host, doing airport pick-ups and coordinating our hotel stay / work locations. (Thanks, Ryan!)

So, what are we doing here? The primary focus for Shaun, Phil, Tiffany, Natalia, and myself is to re-work the Gnome User Guide for Gnome 3. We are using the Mallard syntax to write more topic-focused help, addressing specific needs of users rather than providing help in a long-form manual format. We’re currently on day three of the hackfest, but we have three and a half more days to go. We will need every day–there is still much to cover.

An additional focus of the hackfest is to write Gnome platform and developer documentation. This is primarily the focus of Johannes and Germán, but Shaun will be helping with this as well. Thus far, Johannes has been working on implementing Gnome-related programming tutorials in several different languages. Some of his tutorials feature sounds, and we hear bleeps and bloops coming from his laptop every now and then . . . he’s making some pretty good progress.

Some of you may recognize Phil Bull’s name, as he is on the Ubuntu doc team, too. That means two Ubuntu users contributing to upstream Gnome documentation. Phil is even writing parts of the shell documentation from within Unity. (Ok, he looks over at my laptop which is running Gnome 3). But still . . . Group hug, Ubuntu / Gnome. Group hug.

Finally, I know the rule of “pics or it didn’t happen, so here are a couple of images to tide you over for now.

(Yes, I know that the pics are a little too big for my blog settings for now . . . I’ll have to fix it later.)

Thanks to the Gnome Foundation for sponsoring my hotel stay, to Syllogist.net for the muffins in the morning, and to Seneca College Centre for Development of Open Technology for providing the space.