Re: Blog post for ubelly.com

Cheers Doug! I've made the changes you suggested.

Chris Mills
Open standards evangelist and dev.opera.com editor, Opera Software
Co-chair, web education community group, W3C
Author of "Practical CSS3: Develop and Design" (http://my.opera.com/chrismills/blog/2012/07/12/practical-css3-my-book-is-finally-published)

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On 20 Oct 2012, at 19:21, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> 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 available, but some of them are low quality, out-of-date, or both.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 18:29:59 UTC