mbabbitt

I find the user documentation written by many in the opensource community to be very hard to follow since are writtey by people who are truly dedicated geeks (no offense intended; geeks are great but with severe limitations; they are very specialized) and not by someone with a knowledge of how to talk to newbies/non-specialists of their system. I try many things in many manuals and they simply don’t work. They need some usability expert tech writers. The problems arise often due to an instructions problem. When they blame the user’s misunderstanding you have to ask where this misunderstanding comes from. The MySQL documentation is a perfect example. Some of it is awfully hard to follow or reproduce; when you know how it all makes sense! Similarly the 5 minute WordPress install has a step, #4, where it states to Upload Everything. WHERE? WHAT? Only geeks would not put in the few nouns and adjectives that would clear up this statement. I think it means: “Using a FTP transfer client, upload (copy) all of the files (in the WordPress directory you just unzipped) to the database you will be using for your blog.” Notice how just a few words clears up so much. For newbies, it is just about impossible to understand or even know where to begin from the instructions given. At least you know above that you need an FTP Transfer client and you had better know how to get to the database you will be using. It’s a start.