Friday, January 25, 2008

2 Blog or Not 2 Blog

I figure there are three things that making blogging suited for software:
  1. A small interested group of users can subscribe to a blog without giving out an email address.
  2. The information in the blog can be found using a general search tool like Google.
  3. It's easy for a busy programmer to post.
I think this last point is not to be ignored - I post a lot here because it's easy enough to whip up a blog post that I can write one while the sim is booting.

The down-side of this is that blogs are not self-organizing. The blog is chronological, and somewhere within a heap of 200+ posts are detailed information on scenery topics not documented on scenery.x-plane.com.

That's not good. So I'll be trying to make a concerted effort to write real permanent documentation for some of the new scenery system topics that I cover. Documentation on DDS is in the works.

Part of the problem is that my interface for updating the X-Plane scenery website isn't that robust. One of the nice things about the plugin system being a Wiki is that it's easy to organize and easy to edit. (And one of my frustrations with "support forums" is that they don't self-organize...they mix questions and answers based on history and not a search key that a user might use, like "what's wrong with my card." We'll be supplementing the Linux forum with a Wiki soon.)

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