(2002-04-16) a

Jon Udell on his Zope development experiences. Includes some clues he's worked through regarding Catalogs, using Python instead of DTML for a tree control, etc. I wish he was documenting this development process in a WebLog so we could go through the dirty details with him!

Here's Russ Lipton on documentation-via-weblogging. "Real" documentation is narrative - the accumulated lore (Story Telling) of a community Passionate about its tools. It doesn't matter whether the tool is Doom, MsWord, Python or Radio Userland. By narrative, I mean that documentation accumulates as a community story about a product's use and use-anticipation (call it vision for enhancements) over time... This frustrates folks who haven't grown up playing Civilization II-and-its-discontents. Describing software, let alone documentation, as a game-like, communal (Game Playing) activity makes the suit-and-tie set grind their teeth in rage... The game becomes more fun as the narrative grows richer... I am not sure what intelligent participation means. If this essay is mere hand-waving, let's toss it. But, surely, it must and can mean a process of cooperative logging, directory-building, rating, referring and dialoguing about Radio and - ideally - the creation of a few useful tools for the above. Much of this is happening across a wide set of Radio weblogs already but we don't know yet how to mix the serendipity of cross-references with explicit map-making.