I dont know about you guys but i find the rails wiki and other online ressources (technoweenie’s website) very hard to find the info i am looking from.
I thought they ought to be grouped and categorized. like say you want to know more about models, there sould be a model category and in this model sub categories and then articles/tips/code snippets/error explanations in this subcategory.
Take for example wikipedia, imagine if they show their data like they would now in wiki.rubyonrails.org it would be completely unusable.
or am i missing something ? how do i guys find the correct info ? say you have an error? i find myself googling page after page and tracking down the error always takes me too much time.
With all of the rails-related (and mostly valid) hype around efficiency
and usability, when I started as a newbee, I chuckled everytime I
visited the wiki. That being said, the caboo.se doc project looks
pretty hot.
Compared with other open source projects, the quantity and quality of
rails information on personal blogs is an amazing phenomenon. I mean,
it's not a very DRY way to learn a new language/framework, but every
rails newbee by necessity a) improves their google skills, b) knows all
the experienced developers by name and blog theme, and c) has become
convinced one way or another that they should blog about their
experiences. A wonderful thing compared with something like TYPO3
(which I also work with) which has such an (overall) amazing deficiency
of available documentation and yet still has such a loyal userbase.
Compared with other open source projects, the quantity and quality of
rails information on personal blogs is an amazing phenomenon. I mean,
it's not a very DRY way to learn a new language/framework, but every
rails newbee by necessity a) improves their google skills, b) knows all
the experienced developers by name and blog theme, and c) has become
convinced one way or another that they should blog about their
experiences. A wonderful thing compared with something like TYPO3
(which I also work with) which has such an (overall) amazing deficiency
of available documentation and yet still has such a loyal userbase.
The great thing about writing a framework like Rails very rapidly is
you save money on professional documentors. The documentation will get
scattered into thousands of Web 2.0 forums and stuff.
But because the root documentation site is a Wiki, y'all could start
fixing it yourself, right? The great thing about naivete is you can add
to the parts that you didn't understand. You can also transfer anything
you Google for to the wiki. That arranges topics by theme, and improves
the Google pagerank, too.
Finally, I have actually beat a tip or two out of this:
One problem I have with the rails wiki is that sometime it gets infested with spam. I have to go back in time several revisions to get what I want and then clean it up. Its annoying. I think there should be a way to prevent drive-by spamming
Its annoying. I think there should be a way
to prevent drive-by spamming
I don't know if it's 'preventable' without doing damage to the intended usage. But I have been thinking about the possibility of developing an administrative capability for Rails wikies that makes it easy to identify and remove spam updates. Anybody interested in talking about it?
But because the root documentation site is a Wiki, y'all could start
fixing it yourself, right? The great thing about naivete is you can add
to the parts that you didn't understand. You can also transfer anything
you Google for to the wiki. That arranges topics by theme, and improves
the Google pagerank, too.
Which documentation site are you referring to?
PS. The decision to move the rails list to Google groups was great,
the presentation is so user friendly.
