Light Blogging

It's been quite a while since I posted anything here (about a month). To be honest, I have a legit excuse when I say "I've been busy". I've been doing work for Telligent, writing the documentation for the 2.0 release of Community Server. You might think that just "writing documentation" would be a pretty simple, straightforward job (like I did originally) but it's turned out to provide several challenges. Because Community Server has grown into such a robust product, there is a lot of stuff to write about. Blogs, Forums, Photo Galleries, File Galleries, RSS Readers, Security Settings, and on and on and on. I'm only about half-way done with the documentation so far and I've probably got 250+ screenshots of the product.

It's not enough to just "document" the product and it's features, either. I have to think about how to organize the content so that it can answer people's questions in as few clicks as possible. Then there's the glossary, and the index. The table of contents. Keyword indexing. Fortunately, RoboHelp makes most of it pretty automated but it's still time consuming.

The awesome side-effect of documenting Community Server is that I'd say my knowledge of the product has increased by about 2000 %. The guys at Telligent are kidding either when they say that 2.0 is going to be a major improvement over their 1.x releases. It keeps getting better with every week.

I definitely am not going to be able to make my Jan 1, 2006 goal for the DevCampus beta, either (unfortunately). I think once the work with Telligent slows down/stops I'll be able to take a "break" and finish up the site for beta testing.