On Saturday, July 17, 2010, Dave Everitt <[email protected]> wrote: > I've added a condensed version of my points to the issue tracker. > > I do realize this is a one-man project, and that this one man also has > to earn money, and am therefore grateful and will probably donate > something from my own (currently meagre) income. I agree about the > "documentation for someone else's project" issue, but often find other > project documentation over-complex,
Yes understandabilty is an issue. My bigger complaint about third party documentation provided with other packages is incompleteness. Not only is important stuff missing, the whole document is written by developers who generally have a better base understanding of things. Thus often not real good for absolute newbies. I can't claim my documentation is perfect either as information is all other place and I don't have the absolute newbie step by step tutorial. Either way, I do get annoyed though when people will not even bother to try and read the documentation in the first place and who instead come to you expecting to be to spoon fed on every minor point along the way. These people seem to be totally oblivious to the fact that they are wasting your time. They treat you like a help desk who is only there to serve them. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I really do want to do some better documentation. Because I expect the tools to probably work well for me, I was looking at using Pages on a Mac/iPad and pushing drafts up to the iWork site with people being invited to participate to review and comment on them. It would thus effectively be a evolving document over an extended period with possible periodic drops to a public site. The issue with putting all that effort in is how you get some due compensation. I am not too keen on the idea of publishing a dead tree version. Plus from what I have seen to date, people in the Python community are tight arses when it comes to money. When web2py author put his documentation on scribd and charged people for it, there were so many complaints. I should highlight that I am not expecting to be rolling in money from this as unless there is some angel out there with lots of money to throw around, will never get back what I have put into this. Right now the number of donations amount to a lot less that 1% of downloads, so few that one would need a lot of zeros in that percentage after the decimal point. It is more about getting at least some sense of feeling that people value what one does. Any donations nearly always end up buying stuff for my two and half year old daughter such as clothes, toys, books or as is developing, games to feed her growing iPhone game addiction. I have been thinking of late about making the request for donations a bit more prominent and also make suggestions for how much. Specficially looking at suggesting that people who use mod_wsgi for personal sites contribute what it costs them for one month of web hosting for their site. If a commercial organization using it for their own site, then two times that value. If a managed hosting service that is making money off other people, then three times what they charge their customers for one month of their hosting services. When you look at this that isn't a great deal of money and for personal users is usually going to be less that $20. You still will not get many people feeling they get enough out of the software to make a contribution, but hopefully it may encourage something more than the small number of contributions that get now. That way I feel it is a bit more valued and I will continue to put in that extra effort that I do when you compare what I do to other open source projects. > so (partly for my own sanity but > also to help the community) I sometimes re-write it in the simplest > possible terms (e.g. South and Django: http://gist.github.com/453421 ) > and since Django has the largest(?) user base of all the possible > applications I thought the Django integration page on the mod_wsgi > wiki would be a good place to start as a template for the other > integration guides. > > The bit about me being 'a good sub-editor' with 'a passion for making > instructions as simple as possible' means I'd be happy to start > editing a draft of that particular page for approval. If that helps at > all. I'll definitely get back to you if I go down this path or some better documentation as describe above. Graham > And thanks for the PyCon talk link :-) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "modwsgi" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/modwsgi?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "modwsgi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/modwsgi?hl=en.
