Yesterday, I posted over at Critical Futures the second of, an apparent, series of four posts on dexy. Dexy is cool because it's a pretty nifty tool for doing documentation in a new and potentially very powerful manner. While I think playing around with Dexy is cool and important (and I'm having fun tinkering a little, seeing the world in a slightly different way and then running away to absorb and re-assess) it's also very important to think about the reasons why tools like Dexy are incredibly important.
Read on for: `Dexy and Literate Documentation <http://criticalfutures.com/2011/01/dexy-and-literate-documentation>`_
Also, as part of this post and series (archive recently updated!) I've been developing a technical writing section of this wiki, which has included a couple of little pages and snippets that I've been hanging onto for a while, and a number of pages that I think I'd like to write wiki pages on. These include three major issues in technical writing and the tools used to build documentation resources that build tools that yesterday's addresses. They are: /technical-writing/atomicity or smaller "atomic" units of documentation, /technical-writing/compilation or generating documentation statically before publication rather than dynamically on view, and flitering as an approach to document generation.
I'd like to perceptively apologize if my blogging here is not particularly interesting, or topical except in a very "meta" sort of way. One of my primary goals for tychoish.com-as-a-wiki is to be able to keep track of and document the work that I'm doing on line that isn't necessarily blog-post related. Blogging is great, but it's hard to balance writing blog posts and providing a good media outlet and the kind of work required for developing wiki pages and moving forward on other sorts of projects. These posts, in addition to spreading links, and offering short partially formed thoughts, will likely serve to draw attention to various things I'm working on.
The idea of wiki gardening isn't new, but I like it. Wiki's are so simple and so easy to create that the only thing you can really do to cause a wiki to fail is to neglect it. Not that the proper care and feeding of a wiki isn't challenging, but it is simple. In any case I suspect many of the meta posts will be "gardening" posts in the sense that they'll draw attention to recent edits of wiki pages and note the new and developing pages in solicitation of your contribution.
Shovels up!