You’ve got to hand it to the Atlassian team – they are seriously clever. Wikipatterns.com launched recently to give people a place to go for advice on improving wiki adoption. The content is very useful to have in one place even if what’s there right now won’t be new to most people using wikis. It is undoubtedly useful and Lars Trieloff from the Mindquarry team has already linked to it (Mindquarry develop a soon to be opensource wiki that’s integrated with a bunch of other cool looking stuff). I’m sure other wiki vendors will be linking to it over time as well.

According to our stats, yesterday I deleted over a thousand lines of code – sounds like a productive day to me. Hopefully today I’ll find another thousand lines to delete. It’s amazing how unused methods can build up without you noticing. Eclipse will tell you about unused private methods, but not about public ones that aren’t used anymore. Most of them had unit tests even, just that the entire functionality had become unneeded. There’s probably some duplication in there as well that will let us delete more lines of code.

There were a few interesting comments on my last post. Firstly from Hen:

People are attached to their editors and not their markup. If Maven had moved from xdocs to apt-gui for their site creation, I doubt there would have been many takers. It’s true, people are very attached to their editors, but you don’t have to force them to change, it’s also not a reason to write customized mark up languages. In Maven’s case, the documentation winds up being published as HTML so that’s really the best format to use, people can use whatever editor they want to edit the HTML and it allows people to choose to use a WYSIWYG editor because they exist. This is similar to what Tim O’Brien said:

Tim O’Brien said:

I’ve been writing some APT of late, and it’s painful. Actually, on second thought almost everything that involves working with any sort of markup (no matter how lightweight) is incompatible with writing. It is difficult enough to proofread, nevermind having to constantly switch between the Wiki-esque markup of APT and then having to sit through a site generation. It’s amazing how often developers fall into the trap of changing technical details like file formats instead of actually doing the hard work to provide a simple intuitive interface. The problem is, users don’t want simpler they want simple. No matter how much you simplify a markup language, it’s still something the user has to learn and then constantly think about instead of being able to focus on what they actually want to do.

We’ve been struggling with ways to improve our documentation for quite a while, but we’re still finding that our documentation just isn’t good enough. The biggest frustration with the current tool is that you can’t link to a specific page on our web site so our support team has to tell people to go to the manual, click this then that then this other thing and scroll half way down the page. I think there was also a complaint that they look ugly.

Rob Dawson:

I’m looking forward to my second month. One of the more interesting parts is that AJ is coming back from holiday. I’ve worked with some pretty great people over the years, but with very few that have been held in such high esteem by the rest of the team. I’m looking forward to getting to work with him.

I can’t see that attitude lasting too long. :)

After many years of not taking my holidays often enough, I’m playing catch-up a bit this year so I’ve been on holidays since Christmas. It’s been really nice to switch off from work completely, but tomorrow I’m back in the office. Normally about this stage I’d be starting to think of all the things I’ll need to catch up on or get started on etc. This time however I’ve been away so long that I have absolutely no idea what they’ve been working on, where they’re up to or what I’ll be doing next week.

Scoble linked off to Blogwerx’ new plagiarism detector today which is awsome publicity for them and in most situations would be a sensational boost to a new or newish product. Unfortunately for Blogwerx, their system is completely non-functional, not even the help button does anything. Nor does the all important, money making upgrade button. There’s simply no excuse for releasing software that is this badly broken to the world.

I just hope they didn’t pay out the $30000 to speak at Demo or if I were an investor I’d be seriously annoyed at them wasting that much money without having a product ready to actually sell. It sounds like the CEO may have just sidled up to Scoble without paying to do a demo so they may be lucky.

Hey Scoble,

Your blog ate my comment. Most likely Akismet flagged it as spam incorrectly. I must admit, I’m not comfortable with the design of Akismet – allowing everyone and anyone to decide what is spam and what isn’t seems to be asking for trouble. That said, I have taken to using black lists for email recently. In that case though I’ve been careful about which blacklists I picked and checked that they all had simple systems for getting back off the black list. Akismet doesn’t seem to provide any information on how they decide a comment is spam or provide anyway to protest against it.

A new release of Java, a new wave of people saying they won’t buy Macs unless Apple get their Java update now, dammit now! John O’Conner joins the chorus. Of course, there’s no mention of why he needs Java 6 instead of Java 5, just that he has to be up to date with the very latest. Last time round at least people were eager to use generics and other new language features, but there’s really not that much that changed in Java 6 outside of a few specific cases.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – the best syntax you can use for your wiki is HTML, or probably better XHTML. It’s a defined standard with a wide range of excellent WYSIWYG editors, it’s well known, very portable and saves you from having to write a converter to display your wiki pages.

David Van Couvering is the latest to complain about incompatible wiki syntax and he’s certainly not alone in his frustrations. People don’t want to have to learn yet another crazy wiki syntax, they want an intuitive interface that just lets them write their content. HTML provides far more flexibility than any wiki syntax, particularly around tables, which makes presenting data a lot easier.

From the Creating Passionate Users blog:

Do you know what the “comma-stupid” phrase is for your product or service? In other words, do you know what is most meaningful for your users? Because whatever that word or phrase is (i.e. the part that comes before the “, stupid!”), it should be driving everything from product development to documentation to support and marketing.

More and more I’m seeing people value the editor in a system over anything else. When Rob joined Ephox he switched to WordPress because among other things: