This morning, a sort of affirmation came to mind – shorter, crisper content, easy to access, easy to consume is preferred. One can see it all around – in the form of 140 charachters or around that today. But definitely nothing to stop that number from changing from 140 to maybe 500.
I’m talking about the technical content for products, as an example. Surely, I can’t explain an installation procedure in 140 charachters, but I might be able to do that in say 500 words? So, I write a snippet of a procedure, give it a sensible and logical ID, and connect all these snippets to form one installation procedure of a certain feature.
Now that sounds doable. And then I put that snippet in a content library. I tag the snippet with all the logical tags that give it context. I put it up on the shelf along with other snippets. Along comes a user, who’s interested in putting together a certain procedure for a feature he’s tweaked from the base product. Aha – now that’s a library that would be useful for him to pick from. The logical tags guide his choice and using the right technology, he builds his set of snippets or as we would like to call it – an installation manual!
I quite liked this story. Did you?
Sounds nice. It’s the way most of new research papers are written – each co-author bringing in his or her contribution to the paper, though we don’t work in such a systematic way with tags etc. May be a good idea to organize our work (at least for our own ready reference later). What do you use for a CMS? Have to check if wordpress can be installed on an internal / personal server…
Thanks for the idea.
That’s an interesting insight, Shashi. Yes, organizing reference material is a good way to increase reuse and overall productivity. Haven’t yet got down to working with a CMS but hope to do so, in the very near future
Quite interesting. It’s a good idea to collect snippets as a library. It sounds like another version of Quick Reference Card. I may be wrong.
Definitely a quick reference card would be one possible output. But I feel there could be much more the user can create when s/he has the freedom to mix and match, isn’t it?