Judd Maltin ([email protected]) wrote:
> Thanks for putting an eye to this, guys.
> 
> The top of the page, with my h1 and h2, are my new additions.  The bolds
> are Robs originals towards the bottom.

Ah, I see.

> Deeper curation is definitely required.  This was a first pass at enriching
> and updating.  I wish the github wiki would allow html embedding.

It does allow embedding of some HTML - <table> at least ...

> Youtube has nice rich tagging, etc.  Plus, there no TOC features, except the
> sidebar plugin.

The lack of ToC is tracked here:

  https://github.com/gollum/gollum/issues/380

and it looks like someone might implement it soon due to a sudden
burst of energy:

  https://github.com/gollum/gollum/issues/648

However there are other solutions, e.g. this looks pretty nice:

  https://github.com/hybridgroup/GitHub-Wikifier

> I think it would take a few hours to get it just right.

Maybe, but it would only take 20 mins to make some vast improvements.
"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." ;-)

> Time I'm not assigned.

I understand that right now we're all feeling the heat at the moment
due to the aggressive release schedule - and please take the following
remarks as general observations on the project rather than any kind of
comment on your own great work! - but I believe it's a false economy
to deprioritise documentation tasks even when under pressure to
accomplish other goals.

As well as the immediate benefits which good documentation brings to
existing contributors (where the break-even point always happens
earlier than I expect), there is a potentially huge but currently
untapped community out there who could help us move a *lot* faster.
But one of the big reasons that Crowbar has not seen widespread
community adoption yet is that we still don't have friendly
documentation (although we got a *lot* closer in the last few months).
Look at:

    http://crowbar.github.com/

and now compare it with:

    https://juju.ubuntu.com/

The difference is *so* enormous that if someone is looking for a
solution in this space, currently they are almost guaranteed to pick
Juju regardless of any technical considerations, simply because the
Juju website portrays Juju as an incredibly active, healthy, credible,
friendly project with significant momentum, with backing from a strong
community.  In contrast, our website is more like what you'd expect to
see from a project run by a small bunch of hackers in their spare
time, and I wouldn't expect most newcomers to delve deeply enough to
realise that's far from the reality.

In November I submitted a Trello card to address the public website:

    https://trello.com/c/dBW9dlVu

but despite it being on the current sprint board ever since, AFAICS
there's been zero progress so far.  Didn't we have someone assigned to
work on this?

So in summary, I believe we are vastly under-estimating the importance
of having a decent documentation, or at least under-prioritising it.
Sorry for the rant, but I think we really need to address this now if
we want "market" Crowbar and attract new contributors at imminent
events such as the Havana summit.

If you made it this far, thanks for listening, and sorry for raising
an uncomfortable issue ;-)

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