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Conference season is underway, with DocTrain and AODC recently finishing. As such there is a lot of great and interesting blog posts out there, some are catchup style so if, like me, you didn’t attend you can still get some nuggets of information from them. But the type I prefer are the ones which collate the various ideas and pull them together.

So, with that in mind, if you only read one of the posts linked below, make it the first one.

DocTrain Conference thoughts
Tom chats to Noz Urbina from Mekon and starts to pull together some of the varied threads I’ve covered here into a vision of the future which, in my opinion, makes sense. It’s great to see this kind of thing being discussed and it’s the step beyond where I’d gotten with my thinking. Well worth a read.

Some thoughts on writing better error messages
Real-world tales of woe shed some light.

This lack of coordination between error reporting and error origin often leads to incorrect human reasoning about root causes. One simple help to sysadmins (and other users) would be to report errors in context.


Separating content, structure, format and behaviour

One from a session of AODC which helps properly define how and why we should be separating out the various components of information production.

What we’re aiming for:
* Maintainability — you can change one of the above four components without breaking the others.
* Re-usability — you can re-use the same bit of JavaScript, for example, in other documents.
* Separation of skill sets — different people can work on the component they know best and enjoy most.
* Simplified updating of content — content is likely to be the component you update most often.

Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle
Pertinent to anyone working with an application that has any form of social web (web 2.0, community interaction, pick a term) features, or for those of us trying to build an online community around their product

The lifecycle is particularly relevant to web-based software because the product is inextricable from the service. The product is the service. If a person has a question about what your software does, for example, you can literally build that answer into the software itself.

Wiki on a Stick
And finally, a downloadable, zero install, personal Wiki. May be useful if you want an example of how Wikis work. Extra handy for maintaining your own To Do lists or as a way to centralise your notes (or both).

That’s all for now.