[Pdweb] Proposal wrt. guide new users with silk gloves

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 28, 2007, at 5:40 PM, Steffen wrote:

> I've been thinking about how to best and with less changes to the  
> current website make the into-tour to Pd land feel more like trip  
> to Bhutan; or Nangijala if you prefer.
>
> My focus was fist to give a more detailed explanation of what  
> opportunities there are with respect to getting Pd. The fist easy  
> step was to add extra information to the downloads section (and  
> maybe rename it to "getting Pd"), but i've fund that it might be  
> better to do some more through out chances to the site, which i  
> think will be a good solution in the long run.

I think "downloads" is appropriate since most software pages use that  
term for the page where you get the software, from my experience.

> To be more precise. Instead of expanding the download page, i'd  
> keep it simple but serve the info i think is needed (or would be  
> nice to have) elsewhere:
>
> The About section, which i'd like to expand into three parts.
> 1) a slight rewrite of the current about page making it more like  
> the wikipedia page on Pd, that is with a few screenshots and  
> feature descriptions.

yes!

> 2) some explicit examples that can be downloaded, much like the  
> examples on the processing site. This have been discussed before,  
> where the conclusion more or less were, that having both a curated  
> showroom regularly updated and a more alive share-your-work-section  
> on the website would be more desirable then a static example  
> section just. I still agree. But i'd rather have a static example  
> section then nothing. And it seam more likely that such think cold  
> happen then the other. And then it will be more in line with this  
> About section, it could use more digestible examples, which would  
> let fx a showroom use it's potential to have a more advanced and  
> arty focus.

I think this should be the showroom.  We should strongly encourage  
people to include the sources.  It could also be a question for the  
curator at the time.  If I was curating, I think I would only include  
works that release at least some of the sources.

>  3) a page describing the goods in the Pd shop (vanilla, pd- 
> extended, devel, externals, abstractions, pddp, etc). This section  
> in particular i think new users would benefit from knowing from the  
> start. i wish i did.

I don't think newbies need to know about the subsections "externals",  
"abstractions", "pddp", etc.  But yes to the vanilla/pd-extended/ 
devel discussion.  I tried to explain on the downloads page, but I  
suppose it could be made clearer.

> The documentation section. There will be pointers from that about  
> section 3) to appropriate pages or parts of the documentation  
> section. Fx. about how to build Pd or externals one self. I think  
> it would be nice to have a sub-section of the documentation  
> dedicated to building. That is move the general building stuff out  
> of the dev section and into the user docs.

"user docs" should be newbie focused, but build stuff could go in an  
"advanced" section I suppose.  But generally, building software is  
categorized as "developer" stuff, from my experience.  To me, it is  
very important that we do not needlessly create our own categories  
for these things.  There is a pretty broad consensus for how to label  
and categorize these things on websites which I think we should follow.

> Another sub-section i think would be nice to have in the docs  
> section, which also relates very much to new users, has to do with  
> the ideas Georg roughly expressed in on pd-list about adding info  
> about how to load lib in Pd-extended, namely a section about the  
> fist steps one would do in the Pd world just after reading the  
> About section, having installed it and read the (html) manual.  
> Issues like
> - how is the help browser organized
> - how do i use other peoples patches, which is much related to
> - loading libs or abstractions, or starting Pd
> In other word a more pragmatic intro then then one from the manual  
> (syntax) and the interactive getting started with the Pd (semantic)  
> (and the about section ("what it this at all"?))

Sounds good, sounds like specific user docs.

.hc

>
> I'll stop this here. What i think should be reorganized elsewhere -  
> in particular in the docs section - i won't bother you with now.
>
> It would be nice to know what you folks think about these ideas.  
> Fx. how does this fit with what the you'd like to see happen?
>
>
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