Re: Blog post for ubelly.com

Hi, Chris-

On 10/20/12 12:35 PM, Chris Mills wrote:
> I've been asked to write a blog post for Microsoft's ubelly.com site,
> which should give us a decent amount of exposure.

Cool!


> Can a couple of
> people give the following a quick read and let me know if they reckon
> it sounds ok?

Looks great to me!

Just a few small comments, inline...



> Documenting the webplatform(.org)
>
> Chris Mills
>
> 9 months ago,

I think it was more like a year ago... the very beginnings of the 
conversation well before TPAC, and I held a breakout session at TPAC, 
though we only started getting really serious a few months later.

So, I'd say "About a year ago," or "Late last year,"


> a small group of people — including employees of W3C,
> Opera, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and others —

I think "people from" sounds better than "employees of"...

At that point, we were talking more as interested individuals, not as 
organizational representatives, per se.


> started talking about
> a new documentation project for information covering open web
> standards. Yes, there are lots of documentation sites already
> available, but some of them are low quality, out-of-date, or both.
> Some have great information about some subjects, but not others. And
> generally it takes web developers a lot of time to find all the
> information they want. It would be great for all the information
> providers to get together and produce one authoritative resource to
> tell web guys all the information they need to know to do their job!
>
> The idea was very warmly received by all parties involved, and so we
> all started solving problems together, working out an infrastructure
> for the project that would scale well and handle lots of different
> contributors, working out marketing and business plans, and putting
> together a large list of content from different resources — such as
> HTML5 rocks, MSDN, MDN and Opera's web standards curriculum — that
> would act nicely as seed content to get the project started. Ideally
> we wanted this to be an ever-evolving project controlled and written
> by the community, rather than a bunch of big name vendors telling
> everyone what to do. As the founding companies, we just wanted to act
> as guides, as custodians, empowering the community to document their
> web as effectively as possible!
>
> It was hard work leading up to initial launch of the project,
> especially as we wanted to get enough done on the content and site
> styling to ensure that it would look unfinished but not embarrassing,
> and therefore attractive for other contributors to come on board. On
> October 8th, we launched Webplatform

I'd say "WebPlatform.org" here.

> on the world, and got a really
> marvellous response, with loads of people jumping on the project to
> help out.
>
> I think we've been fairly successful. The site looks cool, the IRC
> and Q&A are active and breeding healthy conversation, the blog has
> articles in the works, and more importantly, the Web Platform Docs
> Wiki is online with close to 3000 articles of reference and tutorial
> content already published, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and
> more, and a whole host of contributors helping to hammer the articles
> into shape.
>
> And it doesn't stop there! One

"Once"

> we've got the existing content in
> better shape, our community will be adding more and more as we forge
> ahead. We'll be adding resources for teachers wanting to teach web
> standards-related subjects. We'll be adding live sandboxes to run and
> edit code examples. And much more! Please come and look around, and
> tell us how you'd like your webplatform to be improved! Hell, write
> some code to add the features you want.
>
> It is October 2012, and life is looking good. As days grow shorter,
> the webplatform.org team can at least afford to take a breath before
> we make make our next move, safe in the knowledge that we have at
> least taken cursory steps to unleashing the future of open web
> documentation upon the world. But there is still much to do, and we
> need all the help we can get! To learn more, hop on over to Web
> Platform Docs, sign up for a free account using the Login / create
> account link at the top,

"Login / create account"

(and make this a link to http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin)

> and then read our Getting started guide

"Getting Started" guide

(and make this a link to 
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Getting_Started)

> to find out what needs doing, and how to do it.


Thanks for sharing this, Chris!

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Saturday, 20 October 2012 18:21:22 UTC