rocktreesky

Homeless

addi — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:03:25 +0000

Last week I packed all of my belongings in a storage unit and left my house of 10 years. I've been paring down my possessions so that when I left I could comfortably fit all that remained in a 5x5 ft (1.5m) unit. I stuffed all of my clothes, a few important books, and electrical gadgets in a duffel bag and carry-on. That is what I will live out of for the foreseeable future. I've chosen to roam and I don't know when or where I'll stop. I have some preliminary plans to stay in Europe for most of the next eight months or so, but who knows where I'll be when. I'm in Dublin, Ireland right now, will be at DrupalCon San Francisco in April and intend to live in Copenhagen, Denmark this summer. That's about all I have sketched out.

The last year has been intense in a lot of different ways. I've also been in a deep depression for most of it. No need to get into lots of details, but one of the casualties of all this was my relationship with Colleen. It ended in October, after nine years together. Needless to say, we are both deeply saddened, but determined to work out a lasting friendship. I stayed in the empty house for as long as I could while we figured out what to do with it. Neither of us has any desire to stay in the shell that used to be our home. Aside from the ghostly experience of living in the house, Maryland itself doesn't have much to offer me these days. Most of my good friends from the area have moved away. The house is a quiet place of trees and memories, which I do love, but it also makes me feel cut off, adrift. And sad. Maryland is simply no longer a home for me, and returning there makes me feel empty instead of comforted. More has changed here than my relationship in just the last few months (not counting all of the shit from last year); the deeply wooded lot next to me has been ripped up (every single last ever-loving tree!) for new houses, my cats moved out to live with Colleen, and my elderly next-door neighbor killed himself on his front steps (that image is forever burned in my skull). The time has come to move on. I feel like I am living in a parody of my "home." It has been a good home, a great home, but my definition of home is changing. Or maybe my definition is the same but there is nothing that matches it any longer. What it is changing into or from, I don't know, but I know "home" is no longer here.

So I'm heading back into the world of experience and exploration to see what I can find. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for, but I will try (try, try) to have faith in my self that I will know something when I encounter it. That I won't continue to make fatal mistakes (ha!). I will need to work hard to be open on this journey. I'm beat up, fed up, exhausted, and oftentimes not very amused by all of this muckity-muck when I had a perfectly respectable life going on. But there is also a flame in me that is fascinated and pulls me forward in hope, gasping at fresh air. There is excitement mixed with fear and (self-)loathing. I choose to believe this is a cocktail for discovery and growth instead of despair.

So. I am homeward bound but homeless. And I'm OK with that. Let the journey unfold.

Spreading the love and doing the work

addi — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:49:43 +0000

In the past few weeks I have been building myself up to get back on track with my role as Doc Lead in the Drupal community. I've been off radar for quite a while now (since last fall) and I'm finally getting my feet under me to tackle the work of docs again. In the time that I was out of it though, it was too obvious that there needed to be some changes in how I (and the Drupal community) approach this whole documentation team thing. There were a few other people out there who had expressed the same concerns to me and so I sat down with them to kick around what we need to change. We came up with two fundamental shifts in how we do things as a team: communication and coordination. I think this will take a lot of pressure off of a number of people, myself included, as well as let the community take even more ownership of documentation and play a role in the steering of the ship, even if the captain sometimes goes AWOL.

There is a post up on the Documentation Team group page which goes into the details about changing our main form of communication (focused on that very group) and the new concept of coordinators for the team. Time to spread the love and put some names and faces to the people who are doing the work. Hopefully this will also create more points of contact for folks who want to get involved but just aren't sure where to go or who to talk to. So if you want to share in the work and make some connections to help you on that road, come play with us over at groups.drupal.org and the issue queue. We have lots of good stuff to get going.

Speaking of good stuff, we also sat down and got ourselves refocused on the big monster goals that really require team effort to pull off. We have cleaned up our Community Initiatives section a bit to make it clearer that our current big project is getting the Drupal 7 documentation up to snuff for a great release. Once we mop up Drupal 7 work, we will begin to focus on creating a new, better home for our docs on a new sub-site in the drupal.org family. That project presents some wonderful opportunities but also a tremendous effort with many moving pieces. So, for now, we really need to get Drupal 7 rockin' out the door before we begin the long haul of a new doc home. Please feel free to dig in the Drupal 7 project or if you have a burning desire to work on an initiative of your own, let us know on the Documentation Team group page.

Big thanks to Jennifer Hodgdon (jhodgdon) for hosting our little powwow out in her home in Seattle, as well as Lee Hunter (LeeHunter) for taking his weekend to fly out to the west coast so we could all sit down and sort some of this out.

Photos and gratitude

addi — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:39:12 +0000

My year of a picture a day is drawing to a close soon. It has been a very hard year for me personally and looking back at my year in photos is fascinating. I'm so glad that I did this project. I didn't get one every single day (you can see the missed days in my 2009 archive) but I accomplished my main goal of documenting more of the events and people in my life, as well as just capturing what daily existence has been. I'm fine with the days that I missed and happy with the days I have captured. I have also marginally improved my photography, but more than anything I have discovered the joy of the snapshot, regardless of quality. As this horrid year winds down and the days grow shorter and darker, I've decided to finish the project, inspired by another Flickr group, by making December a month of gratitude. Every day will be a photo and reflection on something I am grateful for. I'm sure there will be days that I really don't want to do it, or can't find anything that inspires me, but I think that pressing myself to reach for gratitude is a much needed exercise for me, particularly right now. I want to end the year with my head up and walk into 2010 with hope rather than fear.

As for next year and my photo project, I intend to keep on going, although I won't join a Flickr group this time. I enjoyed being part of the pool and in the beginning it helped me immensely but I found after the first month or so that I wasn't really participating beyond adding my daily pics. Groups are great, but not something I really seem to use at this point. For a twist on my regular picture a day, this year I'm going to focus on food (drink included). I love food and miss cooking. I'm hoping that focusing my photos on food, I'll pay attention to and appreciate what I consume more. I really hope that it inspires me to cook more as well. It has been a while since I've spent much time on tactile hobbies. My senses of smell, taste and touch are in much need of attention. I used to cook and garden all the time, but that all seemed to fall away as I became consumed by technology and my online life. So, expect a lot of food in 2010 in addition to the continuing parade of random travel, daily life and nature shots.

Next steps for Drupal domination

addi — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:19:20 +0000

It has been a while since I've been on radar, but with Drupal 7 fast approaching and Drupal living in the White House, we need to keep focus on one the keys to Drupal domination: documentation. Here is a little status update on where the Drupal docs world is these days and what's coming up next. (As an aside, I've been distracted from Drupal for a little while due to other things going on in my life, but hope to jump back into the fray by the end of the year.)

Where are we?

Currently our two main projects are working on the new information architecture (IA) and getting Drupal 7 documentation ready. A lot of people have been plugging away to keep things moving.

Drupal 7
We are determined to make sure we have solid documentation for the upcoming, awesome, Drupal 7 release when it finally breaks free. We have a Community Initiatives page set up to coordinate the work to be done. So far work on new installation and upgrade guides is under way, as well as getting the core module handbook pages updated. There has been ongoing work with a whole slew of core doc sprints to keep hammering at core documentation as well in the form of patches for help text and writing documentation for all of the core changes that have gone in.

Information Architecture
We've decided to use a task-based approach with the docs, following the concepts behind DITA (note that we are not implementing DITA XML, just the concepts of topic-based authoring). We are moving forward on the IA work by focusing on one handbook initially and making that a "guinea pig" to work out our process and test out some of our theories on the final way we want to structure things. Our Theme Guide was chosen as the victim and an awesome group of folks went through the entire Theme Guide handbook on Drupal.org and tagged all of the pages with information about what kind of content it contains. I have since gotten a database dump from Drupal.org so that we can easily extract that info and use it as part of the new IA process.

Around the corner

With a lot of momentum behind us, we have a lot things planned for the next few months. We will continue our two main projects, of course, but in addition we have plans for a new documentation sub-site and starting up a new way to get people working together on docs. Here is the lowdown on what's coming.

Drupal 7
We need to keep the work going full steam ahead on Drupal 7. Now that we have hit code freeze, it is time to push into high gear. The "final" freeze for Drupal 7 will be the string and UI freeze on December 1. At that point we will be able to take screenshots and make sure that our documentation is using all of the correct phrasing from Drupal's interface. We need to keep in mind that any doc changes in core have to go in before that date. For the handbook, in addition to finishing the installation and upgrade guides, we need to also make sure that we have the basic information for creating a new site, which means updating the equivalent of the existing Drupal 6 guide. With a totally new UI in D7, our work is cut out for us. We also have plenty of API work to do. You can see a full list on the Drupal 7 documentation community initiatives page. We will be planning more sprints to focus on Drupal 7, so you can keep an eye out on our group page for the where and when of them.

IA
With our data gathered on the Theme Guide, Becca (our IA lead), myself and few other keen folks will sift through the information and plan out a the best way to organize it. This work is best done by a small group of people, and in the meantime we will open up the rest of the handbooks for tagging, just like we did with the Theme Guide, so we can keep that important prep work going. Once we have a plan mapped out, and a rough structure set up for it, we will need a larger group to review, edit and move the existing Theme Guide into the new IA on a scratch site. From here we can decide what changes need to be made to the plan, as well as begin to create a list of new processes and tools that will be needed to ease the transition and allow us to maintain it long term. After we've taken the Theme Guide all the way through and refined the process, we will do the same with the rest of the handbooks.

A new Drupal.org sub-site
In the midst of the Drupal.org redesign, we have also decided that the documentation will be split off into its own Drupal.org sub-site (similar to how groups.d.o and localize.d.o are their own sub-sites). The infrastructure for this was put in place during Drupalcon Paris (big thanks to David Strauss for getting me going) and once we get some things set up, we will be able to use this new site to test out the new IA work, new modules and generally start playing around with creating a home for our docs that caters to our needs.

Peer and Mentoring
Open source is about people and getting people to work together is key. I would like for us to get a core group of people to start working on coming up with a plan for making this easier, and to sort out what processes and tools we can use. There are two main things that we need to address: new people coming in and communication between coders and documenters. I'll have another post coming out where I discuss this in more detail, but providing a way for new folks to contact the right people to get them started and encouraging coders and "docers" to work together in the skills that they excel with, are key to sustainable documentation.

Ready, Set, Go

Whew, OK so we have a lot of things on our plate. These are exciting times and there is plenty of room for people to dig in and get their hands dirty. Our top priority for right now is Drupal 7 and you can get a jump on the next, best release of Drupal by helping out. Check out the list of things to do, dive in, attend a sprint, and feel free to stop by our IRC channel if you have questions. If you are interested in working on the peer and mentoring work or the IA stuff, stay tuned and there will be more info on those coming within the next month.

The Travel Wall

addi — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:15:14 +0000

This year I've been traveling a lot. My Dopplr report for the first half of 2009 says I spent 69 of 181 days on the road. From April 1 to July 31, I spent exactly 50% of my time away from home. It is all for a great cause, making Drupal documentation better, and it sounds exciting to be such a jet-setter, but it isn't really all that glamorous. Maybe if I was in my 20s again and single it would be a more exciting year, but popping in and out of home life and a relationship, spending long periods of time completely out of my element, often all alone and not speaking the local language, is just not as sexy an experience as it sounds. Working, presenting and moving around suck up most of my time, so I've had limited opportunity to even get to explore where I visit.

All of this go, go, go is due to an awesome grant from the Knight Foundation that covers my travel expenses but does not cover my actual time on the road. (Note that the 80 hours of time listed have already been spent, at home, just doing doc work.) So, in addition to the constant flights and moving around, I am also still, ya know, actually working to pay my bills while traveling. My employer, Lullabot, has been amazingly kind and considerate of my schedule and I would've dropped long ago if it wasn't for their patience and care of me. (BTW, I work for the best company EVAH. This entire thing wouldn't be a reality if it weren't for them.) But I do still need to earn my paycheck every week. This is the real world after all and there are things like mortgages involved. I have been spending some of my vacation days as I go, but I'd like to keep a hold of at least some of them for actual family time at some point too. Speaking of kindness and patience, my partner Colleen has been a fricking rock star about all of my time away. (And yes, big note to self to never do a grant again that doesn't compensate my time as well.)

Through all of this, one thing I have come to understand about myself and traveling is that I consistently hit a snag in my travels right about 10-14 days in. Once I am away from home for that long, I stop caring about where I am. Even if the people around me are awesome, the scenery gorgeous, the new experiences lining up, I just don't care. All I can think about is getting home, getting back to my life. I call this my "travel wall." (I do think that if Colleen was with me on the road, the wall would be extended quite a bit, since she is the biggest chunk of my life that is sorely missed and simply can't be filled by anything or anyone else.)

I don't want this to sound like it is all torture or something. I am having a blast meeting tons of very cool people. I've made lots of new friends, had some really wonderful times and I'm looking forward to more experiences coming up. I'm just realizing that I have some limits on how much fun I can have and the limit seems to be an actual number of days I can count down to. Scheduling myself to keep the line on the travel wall is hard for me because I am always trying to fit as many events into a trip as I can, to get the most bang for my buck, especially when going overseas. I also do want to actually visit some of these cool places I go, since after this year, I doubt I'll travel nearly so much again in my life. ;-)

So, all of this is to say, if you meet me on the road and I'm looking a little glassy-eyed or under-motivated, chances are I've been on the road just a little too long and I'm hitting the "wall." It totally isn't a statement about the company I'm keeping or the event I'm attending. I'm gearing up to leave for Europe again tomorrow, heading to Drupalcon Paris, and this will be a 13-day trip. I'm hoping that this trip's wall will be on the long side since I've just recharged at home for just over four weeks (!) and the first few days I will be spending in Copenhagen, with three days off to sight see and I get to stay with a friend (OMG, thank you, Camilla). Also, Copenhagen and Paris are my two favorite cities. While Drupalcon is always a bit exhausting (so I'm sure by the last day I'll be zombie-like), I am really excited to be in the hive energy of the con and see a ton of people I dearly miss. I'm packing my crash helmet to make a good go at ramming the travel wall one more time.

Drupal handbooks IA work begins

addi — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:32:57 +0000

The top priority in the Drupal documentation roadmap that was published earlier this summer was to reorganize the information architecture (IA) of the handbooks to make them easier to use and maintain. Becca Scollan volunteered to take the lead and she has been researching and building out a plan of attack. We are now at a good stage to start doing some work that the whole community can engage in. Instead of trying to tackle the whole thing, our first foray will be limited to the Theming Guide handbook only. We are going to begin looking at and tagging our existing content with an eye towards a new way of thinking about it. We have added some new vocabularies to just the pages in the theming handbook and we need folks to go through and assign terms. Instead of just random tagging, we need to keep some overall concepts in mind. There are guidelines that can be referred to, so that the terms we use will be most useful for the following steps in the process.

For a quick overview of where we are headed, we are looking to move our documentation into a topic-based system. This is using the underlying theory behind the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), even though we aren't using the XML itself (at least not for now). The general idea is to present information with some structure, having each piece of content be focused around a "topic." The core DITA topic types are tasks, concepts, and references. As content is written in this manner, you can then use a variety of maps to display the topics in ways that make sense for different use cases. Before we can dive deeply into this for the Drupal handbooks, we need to see what we have and how things may or may not map out. The new vocabularies allow for freetagging, but we are also looking to categorize the content into these core topic types. You can read a bit more about this on the guidelines page.

I'm excited about this work, not only because we are starting to get our hands dirty, but because this will be valuable experience as we start to learn about and rethink conceptual models of how documentation gets done. If you want to help out and learn as well, please review the guidelines, ask questions and dig in to the Theming Guide. We will have an open question and answer period in #drupal-docs on IRC, on the Freenode network, at 2 p.m. EDT (find your time) on Tuesday, August 18. If you can't make that meeting, feel free to catch myself (add1sun) or Becca (beccascollan) on IRC at other times, or you can create an issue in the documentation issue queue.

Cross-posted on groups.drupal.org.

Drupal 7 docs depend on you

addi — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:28:45 +0000

Drupal 7 is coming and it has a ton of UI changes with the D7UX lovefest that has been going on, in addition to a some very different APIs. This time around it'd be extra nice if we had up-to-date documentation when our beloved Drupal 7 hits the streets. Few want to write it, but many sure bitch when it isn't there. ;-) Drupal 6 was a little, um, lacking out of the gate, and it took us quite a while to get even the basics filled out. We'd like to avoid a repeat of that situation. To that end we have started to organize ourselves to make sure to cover all aspects of Drupal 7 from end user to API. We had the first D7 docs meeting on July 10 and another on July 31. We'll have two more, during August, before code freeze and Drupalcon Paris in September. The plan is to start on work we can tackle now, while in thaw, and plan out what we need to do as soon as freeze hits. We'll have two doc sprint days in Paris and we'd like to take full advantage of them for Drupal 7 by having a game plan already set up.

You can see what we have sketched out so far on the Drupal 7 documentation community initiatives page. It is open to editing so if you feel inspired to add more info and/or dive in, feel free. We will also be conducting some core doc sprints in August to help get core docs caught up to the code so far. The first ones will be this week, on Tuesday August 4 and Thursday August 6 from 7 pm - 9 pm EDT (find your time)*. The idea is to take the time to teach newbies while we get the work done, so everyone should feel welcome to participate, even if it is just watching for now. :-) We need a range of skills to get these done, from review and writing, to needing coders and people who understand how to create and work with patches. We'll have a few mentors on hand at each sprint so please come on by and learn some new skills or share by helping others.

* We'd love to plan more sprints at other times so that folks in other parts of the world can take part. If you would be willing to mentor a sprint, let me know and we can get you familiar with what you need to feel comfortable. Then you can just pick a date and time that is convenient for you.

Thinkin bout electronica

addi — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:37:01 +0000

I don't know how I survived long-distance travel before mp3s. You can only carry around so many cassettes or CDs. When I leave the house for a trip my earbuds are pretty much a permanent fixture until I am home again. At home, if I'm at my computer, I'm probably listening to something all the time. I listen to lots of different genres of music, but overall my standard, fall back is something within the electronic realm. Don't get me wrong, I can also listen to Bettie Serveert anytime of the day or night, but by and large electronica is my default if I'm just not sure what I want to listen to. I love listening but I'm not so good with the ten million terms used to slice and dice the music into the most subtle categories, nor do I really care that much. I'm not even going to bet that everything I lump in "electronica" would technically fall there for others. I have my own little system for identifying my mood/music match and the other day I was thinking of it in more concrete terms. So, here is how I tend to think of the electronic music in my collection with some tracks that I could find out on the internets. Lots of stuff falls all over the place and in between, but these tend to be my "moods:"

Comatose: This is the stuff that makes me drool from inactivity. I typically don't listen to this except when trying to sleep (great for red-eye flights) or making myself take a serious energy timeout.
Some examples: Isan - Cinnabar, Dave and Ardai - Recovery Room EP

Groovin: I spend a lot of time in this mix. A lot of stuff I lump here tends to be called downtempo, ambient, blah, blah, blah, by the cool kids. It has more going on than Comatose but isn't frenetic and can keep me moving along for hours at a time. Lots of stuff I love, love, love here.
Some examples: Cassettes Won't Listen - MPC, Sternklang - The Herb

Dance: Yeah, OK, this is a range of music that just makes me wanna shake my booty or jump around. If I could stay up past 11 pm anymore, I'd love to still go out dancing, but since I'm old and lame I often only dance in my office or hotel room.
Some examples: Le Tompé - Tell Me, Tiësto - Traffic, Astral Projection - Kabalah

Soundtrack: For the badass mofo hero(ine) in all of us. Lots of flying fighter jets in space, blowing up 10-story robots, running through jungles, and all the ladies want to get with me. If you don't have a world like this, I am sorry for you, though you may still like the music.
Some examples: Ugress - Zombie Eagles, Fluke - Another Kind of Blues, Astrix - Techno Widows

I've also got my standard stable of music resources. I tend to only have a handful of resources because my head would explode otherwise, so I'm sure there are a ton of awesome things out there. If there is something more awesome that what I'm using, I'm more likely to drop one and move to the other than try to keep track of more and more awesomeness. (I can only handle so much awesomeness in one lifetime, ya know?)

Spending money

Yeah, I actually buy music. I used to mess with all the peer stuff and grabbed a ton of stuff for free back in the day but I'm not as into that anymore. Lots of the music I listen to is from smaller artists and labels and I'd like to support them.

My main service is eMusic. They have great stuff and reasonably priced subscription set up. They were doing DRM-free mp3s since the start so I've always loved supporting them. If I can't find what I want there, my next stop is Amazon, which again, is DRM-free mp3s. iTunes store is my last stop. Both eMusic and Amazon downloaders will automatically add my new music to my iTunes library so there is no extra hassle involved with regards to that. Lots of the remix, dance stuff I want isn't in the main stores so I also use Traxsource to get DJ cuts.

Radio

Now here's the free stuff. I don't subscribe to satellite radio, like Sirius. I'm a net radio kind of gal. While free, I do financially support free radio that I love. I donate to Soma.fm and am a subscriber at Last.fm. Soma has a bunch of stations, though I only regularly tune in to about three of them (Secret Agent, Beat Blender and Groove Salad). Great selection of tunes and no commercials. They rock. That is all.

Last.fm lets the social, friend thing get to work in addition to having stations based on an artist (similar to Pandora) or playing my favorites. One of my favorite things to do is listen to a high match friend's station in explore mode. That will only play songs that I don't have in my collection, so I get only new stuff. They also sometimes have good free tracks for download, like a bunch from the excellent Ugress. You'll notice that a lot of my links up above to artists or tracks use Last.fm because it is a great, centralized place for me to keep track of and share the stuff I like.

The only other net radio that I tune into regularly is Radio Frequence Metz Woippy Clubbing and Dance. This is my typical dance-club-in-a-hotel-room mix.

I should also mention briefly that I will often grab my radio using Audio Hijack Pro so I can have a good mix while offline without having to work hard at making one up myself. It is for the Mac, I love it and it is cheaper than some other options out there. Take that for whatever you want.

The word

I am not big into my RSS feeds or wandering the internets these days for info and honestly my radio sources turn me on to more music than I can keep up with already. I do follow one music blog though that often points to very small netlabel stuff, often free tracks, that I'd otherwise never see. I've found some really nice stuff through Disquiet, like Rich Vom Dorf. If you have any other killer blogs that track the cool, little stuff, let me know in the comments.

A new movement: WOSdocs

addi — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:37:31 +0000

I've been on the go so much that I haven't had the mental space to sit down and articulate a lot of the cool stuff that is going on. A few weeks ago I took part in a new open source conference, Writing Open Source (WOScon). The conference was born from conversations Emma Jane Hogbin and I had last fall, and she took the ideas and made it a reality in Owen Sound, Ontario. It was very small but packed with awesomeness, from people to ideas to food. There were quite a few exciting ideas for the Drupal community which will get written up and worked on down the road a bit. Lots of folks have written up summaries* of the event itself, but that single event has started something quite a bit bigger. The last day of the conference we transformed the conference website into a new community site and started a new Twitter/identi.ca hashtag for #wosdocs. We've started a new open source community to focus on documentation. That may not sound exciting to lots of people, but it is, even if you aren't a "writer" and here's why.

Open source growth

As a whole, open source has been gaining tremendous ground over the years. It is becoming more mainstream every month. Open source software is respected as a viable tool in today's world, but for most every project, the documentation lags behind the quality of the code. As people explore this "new" software, they need to feel like they can let go of the side of the pool and there will be a life raft in the middle if they need it. This generally takes two forms: paid support or community documentation. Open source is growing rapidly, but we are still a very small part of the bigger pie. To accelerate open source growth we need the coders to keep cranking with their bad selves, and we need to provide guidance and support for new users. Open source is an amazing model for making awesome software, there is no reason that we can't produce best of breed documentation with the same community passion.

Industry standards and quality

One of the big take-home points for me at the conference (amongst so many) was that we generally have a very high standard for the quality of our code, but we do not apply those same standards to our documentation. This is a disservice to both the docs and the code it supports. There are a lot of people out there who are documentation professionals; technical writers, editors, information architects, etc. and believe or not, a lot of them are using open source. We need to listen and learn from the pros, just like we do with code. One of the great things about documentation best practices and standards is that there is a whole industry that already looks at these things. We can learn from what is there, apply open source magic and share. The beauty of docs is that the same basic principles are going to apply to all projects, regardless of language (code or culture), structure, or size. Of course, each project will have its own resources and emphasis, but so much base ground can be laid down that is useful to everyone. We have started exploring this on the WOSdocs site by creating outlines for a sample open source style guide, documentation best practices guide and starting a persona library. This is just fricking awesome for everyone from single developer trying to write docs on their own to large teams wrangling complex projects.

Kicking ass

So basically this is good news for everyone and I truly believe that this new movement to make kick ass docs for all of open source is going to move us up to the next level in adoption around the world. As Paul said in one of his blog posts about the conference, I'm excited to know that I will be able to look back and say that I was "there when this began." If you want to be part of ass-kicking history, we are an open community, so head on over to WOSdocs, sign up and dig in. I also plan to be at WOScon next year and it'll be fun to see how much we've grown by then. Maybe we'll even share some of our insider jokes too. Where did that mammoth come from?

* Some posts about WOScon
http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Community/Woscon2009
http://emmajane.net/node/928
http://emmajane.net/node/929

Need some help: surveys, interviews and recording

addi — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:49:25 +0000

A few weeks ago I posted a draft Drupal documentation roadmap on Drupal.org. In that post I attached the full roadmap of goals, but focused on the first two we are tackling: a new information architecture (IA) and recognition/reward for documentation contributors. We had a meeting in IRC shortly after and we discussed a number of questions and ideas. I've been on the road a lot since then, but things are still moving along and this post is to give a little nudge about what folks can do to get involved. We need folks to help with our survey, start up an interview process and give some advice on recording conversations. We are also in the process of scheduling our next meeting to talk about Drupal 7 documentation, so if you want to hop in on that, please fill out the Doodle to set a time.

Surveys

When we posted the roadmap we also opened up a survey to gather feedback on recognizing contributors. The survey is about saying "thank you" to contributors. I'm going to close the survey this Thursday, July 2, so if you haven't filled it out yet, take a few minutes to do that this week. Once we close the survey, we'll need to analyze the results, start to sketch out things we might implement and look at what other surveys may be useful. If you are interested in helping with the analysis, please let me know.

Interviews

The next big item that we need help with is to begin the IA stakeholder interviews. This is one of several ways that Becca is gathering data to construct a new architecture for our documentation. We need folks that are willing to interview, as well as be interviewed. We have a script that you can follow and Becca will provide instructions. The interviews can be done in person, on the phone or using Skype. If you would like to take part or learn more about the interview process, please sign up!

Recording Skype

One related issue we have is that we would love to have the Skype interviews recorded but we don't have good instructions for how to record both sides of a Skype conversation on multiple platforms, using free tools if possible. If you are familiar with recording Skype and have any tips or time to write up instructions for the tools you use, it would be a huge help to the docs team. Feel free to drop me a note, or just add your instructions directly to the handbook in the Content architecture section (click the Add child page link at the bottom and go nuts).

Drupal Twitter hashtag hack

addi — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:31:23 +0000

Too many times I have written a post, got it ready to go, set up my Twitter module to tell the world, and then right after I hit submit, I realize that I forgot to add the Twitter hashtags that will carry my tweet to glory. It occurred to me that maybe I should give myself a reminder by adding some hashtags to my Tweet by default, and the taxonomy terms I am using for the post are a pretty good bet for general usefulness. I whipped up a site-specific hack to do just that and thought others might be interested. It could probably be generalized so that it could be made a patch to Twitter module, but I'm not sure that is a great idea anyway and I don't have the time to even think it through, so have at.

To do fun little hacks for a Drupal site, I always have a site-specific tweak module. The Twitter module hack I wanted was just adding some default text to the Twitter module's form field (the one that appears when you check the "Announce this post on Twitter" checkbox), so I added another case to my existing hook_form_alter (everyone's got at least one, right?). All I'm doing is checking to see if my node has some terms, in a particular vocabulary even, and if so, put a little pound sign in front, string 'em together and add it to the Twitter default form field. Then I can remove or edit as I please before I actually submit it. Even if I remove every single one of them, at least it will remind me to think about it, which has been my biggest frustration.

Big caveat: I never publish when I initially create my posts. This code hack assumes you are working on an edit form, and not a creation (node/add) form. My typical routine is to use Ecto to write my drafts and then push to the site in the "unpublished" state. I then review, tweak and publish. Doing this on node creation is understandably whack, since you don't have a term associated with the node until you've saved it, yah?

So here is the code I'm running on my site, in my rts_custom module:

<?php
//$Id:

/**
 * @file
 *   Custom tweaks for the rocktreesky.com site.
 */

/**
 * Implementation of hook_form_alter().
 */
function rts_custom_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) {
  switch ($form_id) {
    // Snipped other form fun case....
    case 'story_node_form':
      // Only on node edit, not node add, since there are no terms yet on add.
      if (arg(0) == 'node' && is_numeric(arg(1))) {
        $node = node_load(arg(1));
        // Get terms to turn into hash tags.
        $terms = taxonomy_node_get_terms($node);
        if ($terms) {
          $hashtags = '';
          foreach ($terms as $term) {
            // Only hash the terms from the freetagging vocab (7).
            $hashtags .= ($term->vid == 7) ? ' #' . $term->name : '';
          }
          // Add to it, don't replace it.
          $form['twitter']['status']['#default_value'] .= $hashtags;
        }
      }
      break;
  }
}
// Remove this closing PHP tag if you copy/paste this.
?>

One really important thing to remember is that the Twitter module fires fairly late in the process. By default, modules go in alphabetical order, so "T" is one of the last to go typically. My custom tweak module is named "rts_custom," so anything I do in my hook_form_alter is clobbered by twitter module, which fires after it (T coming after R). To fix that situation, I just needed to set my module's weight to be "heavier." Since this is just my quick and dirty tweaks module, I went into the database, found the rts_custom entry in the system table, and manually set the weight field to 1. If this was a module I wanted to deploy on a number of sites, I'd do that programmatically in a module .install file instead.

For those that are really new to this module thing, here is a rundown on how to make yer own:

Create a folder in yer sites/all/modules directory and call it whatever you want (site_tweaks is fine).
Create two files in the folder, a .module and a .info, using that same name (e.g. site_tweaks.module and site_tweaks.info).
Copy that code up above into yer .module file and rename the function with yer special name (e.g. site_tweaks_form_alter). Also, remove that closing ?>. It is there just to make it pretty in the blog post.
Copy this into the .info file:

; $Id$ name = Site tweaks description = Does tweaky stuff to my site. core = 6.x
Enable the module and do that funky module weight thing I mentioned.
Bob's yer uncle.

Sharing across open source lines

addi — Tue, 12 May 2009 10:45:58 +0000

Just one month from today I'm going to get three days of hanging out with brilliant folks from a number of open source projects to talk shop, brainstorm and generally have a great time. I'm heading to the Writing Open Source conference up in Canada from June 12-14. In the true spirit of open source, we're coming together to help each other out. The conference is about collaboration, learning, and getting stuff done. We all have a lot to gain and I hope that anyone who can get there, makes the effort. There will be expert talks, unconference learning, a whole day of sprinting, and a lot of fun.

Sometimes in open source, of all places, there is a strong reluctance to share. I think the open source writing world is less like this generally than, say, code, but there are definitely lines to cross in writing as well. There are "published authors" who don't want to "just give it away for free," as well as the regular, tired line of not wanting to "help the competition." It's open source, people. I'm not going to go into the reasons I think that argument is silly, because it should be fairly obvious. I can understand "I have limited time and prioritize my efforts." I totally get that one. That's why it is cool to make time, like you get at a conference, where you can help both yours and other projects at the same time.

Coming back to the authors/professional writers, there is so much to be written, in so many formats, that unless you truly want to limit yourself, there are lots of opportunities to publish even if you write tons and tons of stuff to give away. As a matter of fact, putting part of your work out there and working with open source doc teams can put you in an even better position as a published author. There is much to learn as well getting your name out there. You also gain valuable skills outside of writing. Open source, being the herd of cats that it is, has its own challenges that are different from many work-a-day jobs. The big issues that open source teams encounter and have to work with on a daily basis are places to push up against boundaries you may not otherwise encounter. They let you add more tools to your arsenal for that day you hit a big, dream project, or you decide you want to move into other careers. I'm also not speaking from some outside idealism here. Both myself and Emma are successful published authors. We are also crazy involved in open source documentation efforts.

So, anyway, come expand your world, learn something new that your little corner of the web might not give you, and help make all of open source better. This conference is probably the one I am personally most excited about this year and I look forward to shaking things up and forging relationships with some very cool people.

[As a note for anyone going from the U.S., I am most likely going to drive up from Buffalo rather than flying in to Toronto. If you are thinking to save a little moolah by flying to Buffalo (Canadian airfare is notoriously taxed to hell), let me know and I might be able to give you a ride.]

126 days

addi — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:54:03 +0000

At the beginning of the year I decided to join a "picture a day" group on Flickr, Project 366-1. I'm not a "photographer," nor do I aspire to be. I joined the group because it seemed like a fun way to get myself documenting the things around me. I view it as a visual diary, which should be quite fascinating to look back on. I'm now just over a third of the way in to the year, 126 days, and it is interesting to look back so far. In January I was pretty fired up so I kept on track. Keeping up with a picture every day has been hard at times. For February and March, I didn't manage to do it and there are some gaps in the calendar. I redoubled my efforts in April though and managed a complete month again. The calendar archive view on Flickr pulls from all of my photos, so I set up a collection of monthly sets so that I can see what I thought was the most important or "best" picture each day. As you can see, some days were just a mark of desperation as I took any old picture, just to meet my deadline.

Through this process of playing with my camera, and the limitations it has, I am definitely learning more about capturing things visually. I still don't take great pictures, but I am appreciating the art and I have been making incremental improvements. Often I learn after I've taken the shot, once I get back to the computer and load it up to take a look. Many a day I see how I could have made it a better picture and I long to go back to make the adjustments. Sometimes I remember these lessons the next time I go out, oftentimes I don't, but I do feel that the experimentation and review is giving me a better eye, even if that doesn't seem to show up in my pictures. :-) For some of my pictures, I do actually just like the shot, like Home, Inside the cloud, and yesterday's Crosswalk, but for many of them I just enjoy being more aware and capturing the day, even, or maybe especially, the mundane. The lessons I am learning about my life, the people in it, the things that catch my eye or attention, are more valuable than getting a pretty picture.

Docs Challenge May: Issue cleanup part 2

addi — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:53:18 +0000

I know that we have done the issue queue work as a challenge already, the very first one in January as a matter of fact. We got a lot accomplished in January, so let's do a spring cleanup. The reason I want to come back to the issue queue is two-fold. First, it still needs lots of love, as always, and second, I plan to finally post a beginning docs roadmap, and get some working groups kick-started around some of our big issues this month. We will be creating a lot of new issues in the docs issue queue, so I'd love for us to tidy up our work area before heading in to some ambitious new projects.

I know that working in the issue queue can seem a little intimidating so I really do want to have times when folks will be in IRC to help answer questions while working through the queue. Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to get "higher approval" for making decisions on issues. This is the everyone's queue, but it is nice to have one or two other people around to bounce ideas off of and ask questions as you work through things. I'll try to be available in IRC on #drupal-docs as much as I can, but I'd also like to have some preset times. So, let's say meet up in IRC every Sunday and Thursday at 5 p.m. GMT (see when that is in your timezone). My schedule will be all over the place this month since half of it I will be traveling around Europe to various Drupalcamps, so I may not be online at these times, but please do come together anyway and help each other out.

Sitting

addi — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:35:43 +0000

In the last month or so I had a period where I felt things going into a bit of a tailspin. It is a cyclical thing where life just feels overwhelming, out of control, meaningless even. I spent almost a week feeling down in the dumps and like I was letting everyone around me down. I didn't know what to do "about it" so I just sat with it, really poking at it for a few days. By the end of the week I had come to accept some things about myself and life. I'll forget them and eventually, around some other corner, I'll meet the dip in the road again. That's how it goes, but every time I ride the roller coaster I learn more about myself and navigating through life. The main thing that occurred to me that week was that I can not be what everyone thinks I am, including myself. I ended up letting go of a lot of notions I have about who I "am" and where my priorities really lie. I'm petty and giving, angry and joyful, ignorant and smart. And I suddenly felt OK with all of it. My life, and life in general, is much bigger than all of these things. I felt like I have been pushing to be a wave on the ocean; the biggest, fastest one I can be, and then I realized that even if I break the surface and become a stunning wave for a few minutes, I'm still going back into the ocean. The drive to punch through the surface and create that illusory feeling of "being different" than all the rest, seemed to recede once I really looked at it.

The continuation of that week of hard introspection and letting go, has brought me back to meditating. Now, I have meditated on and off for over half of my life, but I've never done it regularly. I'll normally sit for a few days, or maybe two weeks, and then I get bored or frustrated and I stop. This time though, things seem to have shifted. I've been sitting every day for a month now and the big difference is that I want to, rather than feeling like I should. I used to try to make myself sit for a minimum period of time, 5, 10, 30 minutes. Now I sit for however long I happen to. I don't even have a clock in the room so that I won't be tempted to keep peeking to see if I'm doing it "long enough." Some days it is five minutes, others, maybe half an hour. Not every day is some blissful nirvana either, far from it. Many a day I am agitated or excited and my monkey-mind is all over the place, but even taking the time to sit and recognize where I am at the moment is immensely helpful. Saying "I'm afraid today" at least lets me acknowledge what's up. I stop and listen to myself. It's amazing what you can find out when you do that. I've also managed to really take to heart Pema Chödrön's words of wisdom in "When Things Fall Apart" (amazing book btw) about caring for your self, so that most days I can smile at my crazy monkey-mind and not get angry or dismissive. Until I read that book years ago, and really let it sink in, I tended to scold myself during meditation, rather than paying attention.

Currently I am re-reading Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Heart of the Buddha's Teachings," which is a great review of the fundamentals of Buddhist thought. Each day, after I sit, I pick it up and read a chapter or a section of chapter to contemplate for the day. I don't always keep it in mind but getting some perspective from my paper "sangha" helps me set off on a more even keel. The sitting, stopping and listening make a horrible day not feel quite so oppressive, and sometimes it even lets me realign my thinking enough that I can actually help make the day better for myself and others. So, anyway, this is a reminder that sometimes moving into the chaos and sitting with it, when you feel like things are exploding or slipping away, can be a grounding and freeing experience. I leave this note to my future self. :-)