Author: matthew

I’ve just added the Annotations, Title, Trackback, and htmltidy modules. Here’s what they do and why I’m using them:

• Annotations: This module enables pop-up descriptions of text items to be added by users. This is compelling for my vision of the Annotated Bugzilla Guide. In-Place annotations, instead of after-the-article comments, can be a very powerful tool. Comments by themselves are great, too!
• Title: This module allows one to link to other nodes by the title of the node, rather than node number. This can be very useful in migrating the Guide over, because as we go through subsequent revisions, node numbers are guaranteed to change, and it’s proving very painful to convert all the links within the document to this alternative presentation method.
• Trackback: OK, this is purely for the geek factor. It allows me to send Trackback notifications to other blogs, and receive them as well. I just dig the functionality, and initially fell in love with it using Movable Type a few months ago. Now that the HD crashed that held my old Movable Type install, and I’m on Drupal, I missed it.
• htmltidy: Another "geek factor" toy. This one cleans up the HTML and gives warnings to the reader if the HTML is broken. I just like keeping things W3C-compliant wherever possible to keep the display clean. If you’re using IE, you’ve probably already noticed that BARNSON.org in the title bar has a black background due to being a transparent PNG; I’d like to avoid as many cross-browser issues as possible.

Dang, I write a lot of nothing.

After about two months of no updates due to flaky hardware, BARNSON.org is back in action. My first goal is to create an interactive version of The Bugzilla Guide and related documentation so that we can create the new and improved version of the Guide. The changes to the Guide from this forum will be incorporated in the next release of the Guide.

Unfortunately, the online edition is HTML, while the print edition is maintained in DocBook XML. I think it won’t be too big a deal to incorporate comments and annotations into the XML version from the HTML, but we’ll see after this initial trial. What this means for you is that you are welcome to make changes, comments, and annotations to the Guide, but the eventual commital of those changes to the actual Guide will have to wait until we have time to integrate it. Time will tell, I suppose.

Traffic to this site is VERY light at the moment, and I expect it to remain so with the other niche documentation that I maintain.