Bit Stampede

We continue to make gradual headway toward deploying the new MindTouch Deki based MDC. After some back and forth, we decided to go with a slightly revised version of the skin that doesn’t attempt to customize the editor’s toolbar. While we had hoped to have the custom toolbar at launch, there are logistical issues with managing the source tree when patching the core Deki code, so we’re going to wait until later. MindTouch is working on a solution to make the toolbar customizable without patching it, so hopefully that will come along before long.

We have one more issue to resolve and then I believe we’ll be rolling the final code out to our test server at last. Once that happens, I’ll be posting a link in various places so folks can try things out.

At this point my goal is to get the test server thrown open for people to try before I go on vacation for the Independence Day holiday, and then throw the switch and migrate MDC to the new software in mid-July. I think that’s achievable.

Before I leave on my vacation, I’ll be posting the information about how to localize the skin. People that intend to work on localization of the Deki skin should contact me so I can make sure they get set up with access to the files. If you haven’t already filled out the CVS/SVN contributor’s form and filed the corresponding bugs, you should do so, CCing me on the bug.

In other news, my paper that I plan to submit to the Wikis for Software Engineering workshop at WikiSym is now in its third draft and is I think pretty close to finished. I hope to submit that before I leave on vacation, as well, since July will be a very busy month for me involving a great deal of travel.

We’re about a week out from the end of the second quarter, and since my goal for this quarter (other than, you know, the Firefox 3 documentation — that little thing) is to get the MDC upgrade rolled out, I’m hoping quite fervently that it will be done in that time. Time will tell.

The progress so far this week has been good. The skin is now in SVN. I’m waiting for confirmation that our ever-so-slightly customized MindTouch Deki is in SVN as well. I’ve posted to the localization folks asking them to get set up to localize the skin, so hopefully that will be underway in the next day or two.

After that, the big tasks are pulling a new update of Deki that fixes a couple of bugs, then another round of testing before we launch. There’s other stuff to do, but those are the major items, I believe.

In other news, someone pointed out to me a very interesting-sounding conference on wikis that I think I’d like to attend this September: WikiSym 2008. I’m working on making arrangements to attend. It looks like I might be too late to do so, but I’m looking into offering a paper as well, if it’s not. There is a little contradictory information about the deadline for submissions; I’ve sent off email asking for details and am awaiting a response.

I’m looking forward to putting to the test the things I learned while working on the Firefox 3 documentation as work begins on the developer documentation for Firefox 3.1.

My first effort along those lines is that I’m going to try to keep the Firefox 3.1 for developers page organized from the get-go, instead of letting it turn into a jumbled mishmash; there were times during which the Firefox 3 page got a little out of hand. It eventually required a massive overhaul that took me a few days to finish up. I hope to avoid that this time around.

Of course, Firefox 3.1 won’t be the enormous project that Firefox 3 was, so this won’t be a real stress test of my plans, but I do look forward to the trial run.

In general, I really enjoy the early stages of the documentation work on a project. There’s no pressure, no rush, and you find yourself learning new and interesting things without having to rush so fast that you miss details.