'Getting started' user guide
goob
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I've been thinking that it would be good to have an 'official' guide to Diaspora for prospective users and new users. Something along the lines of the excellent Diasporial tutorials. At present we rely on sites set up by community members, and the fragility of this has just been brought home by the fact that someone has just pointed out that the tutorials (and the rest of Diasporial, apart from the home page) have been taken down.
Would anyone be up for collaborating on writing a really simple 'how-to' guide to Diaspora, along the lines of Diasporial? If so, let's get cracking.
If anyone is in touch with Kevin Kleinman, I'd be grateful if you'd ask him (a) will he be putting the tutorials back up, and (b) may we have his copy to work from, as this would save a lot of work. We could then just update it where necessary.
goob Mon 1 Jul 2013 7:15PM
Ah right, that would be a great start. Thanks.
goob Mon 1 Jul 2013 10:04PM
Diasporial's back up. It would be great if you could get permission from Kevin for us to use his material on the wiki.
Sean Tilley Mon 1 Jul 2013 10:31PM
He's usually active in the Tent.is community. I'll ping him about it and report back. :)
Jonne Haß Thu 4 Jul 2013 8:26PM
Alright, I talked to @dennisschubert who's hosting Diasporial. He got a "do whatever you want with it" back then from Kevin, so we can start transfering the content to the wiki and if that's done we're going to put the redirects in place.
goob Thu 4 Jul 2013 9:43PM
That's great. Thanks for making the contact, and thanks to Kevin. I don't want to detract from Diasporial or anything like that, but if we can build on his excellent work to have a really simple introductory guide and 'how-to' on the foundation site, I think that would be a good step.
goob Fri 5 Jul 2013 8:43PM
On second thoughts, if DIasporial is still being maintained, there's probably no need to make a similar section on the foundation site. It would be better to focus energies on things for which there isn't already a decent resource available, such as how to choose a pod, as we discussed the other day. Plus, centralising all the resources for a decentralised project is probably self-defeating!
I was just concerned when the site went down as I'm aware that Kevin is no longer involved in the project (at least, I don't think he is), and remember when other resources, such as the Diaspora forum, got taken down.
It might be worth making a repository of the Diasporial files, just in case we need them for the future, but as long as Diasporial is going to continue to be maintained, I think we may as well leave things as they are and not attempt to duplicate Kevin's work on the foundation site.
Jonne Haß Fri 5 Jul 2013 8:49PM
It's maintained in the sense of kept hosted. The content isn't maintained anymore.
goob Sun 4 Aug 2013 2:14PM
I've started working on transferring the Diasporial tutorials to the new project site. I'll update both the content and links.
I think a basic 'getting started' tutorial would be good on the main site rather than the wiki, so I'm planning put the information into pages using the same design as the project site. If you feel these tutorials would be better on the wiki, speak up now.
Assuming these will be part of the main site rather than the wiki, I'll only be able to provide the pages in plain HTML/CSS rather than the Ruby-type HTML pages used in Github, as I really don't understand that, so it'll need someone to refactor them afterwards.
goob Mon 5 Aug 2013 5:50PM
I'm about half-way through updating, editing and adding to the text of the Diasporial tutorials.
One thing we will need is updated screen-shots. Kevin provided ones based on his own account, but I think it would be better to use mock-ups with made-up names, so that no one in particular is identified.
Would someone be happy to do this for me? I don't really have the energy or creativity to take this on as well as the text.
You can see the images that are in the old tutorials by looking at the first four pages of the getting started guide.
I'll put a draft of my new text up as soon as possible - probably in the next 48 hours - as it may be that some additional screen-shots will also be helpful, but if someone's happy to do this, it'll give you a chance to start straight away.
Jonne Haß · Mon 1 Jul 2013 6:23PM
I already asked Kevin if he has backups of the guides and if he'd be willing to dump them into the wiki and setup redirects to the wiki pages. Yet no response, but that was only a couple of hours ago.