untangled blog

KOffice sprint recap

Now that I had the time to recover from all this sprint stress and after two nearly contentless blogs, I thought I might go into details which results we actually achieved.

Inge, Jos, Sebas and me spend our time on working on a marketing strategy for the new KOffice - as you might have read before. Of course, I won’t share our plans here, but the attentive observer of this highly interesting project will most probably come across the neat messages we worked out. We ended up with a nice list of strong selling points and I’m sure that the final release will show that this office suite has a lot of potential, even if the 2.0 version will not be perfect.

Less confidential but not less interesting is the feedback I got on my web concept. Actually it was bought by everybody, only minor issues had to be addressed. We still need to make a final decision on the system we want to use for the landing page - which includes quite some googleing for me - but chances are high that I will come up with something easy to use, easy to maintain and pretty. Thanks to Jarosław for pointing me into a new direction. I hope this might be useful as test case for other projects, especially the lifestream system to show the whole activity around one project that happens anywhere on the net.

It was very interesting for me to meet all those people I only knew from IRC, if at all, and see how they think, work and talk. And I finally understood the usefulness of chatting on IRC while being in the same room: one gets the attention of those that keep staring onto their screen…

KOffice Sprint

This sprint turns out to have been pretty productive. The marketing team (Inge, Jos, Sebas and me) has managed to get all topics covered and now has a finished marketing strategy. I even introduced everybody to the idea of a social stream of all developers involved and people started playing with our demo (thanks to Dirk Olbertz for setting that up!).

Those developers who have already left apparently did so with a good mood. They worked hard during this two days at the KDAB office (thanks to them for hosting us again!). It didn’t even distract them that the office is right in the middle of a huge variety of restaurants, pubs and cocktail bars. There was a lot of more or less quiet hacking going on and I observed some vivid discussions about not so common topics.

And of course I learnt some new things like doing a SWOT analysis, that it makes sense to arrive well rested and that wikis can look surprisingly pretty.

48 hours

I’ll lose my virginity over this weekend.

I have arrived in Berlin this afternoon to attend the KOffice sprint. It’s kind of surprising, I never expected to do things like going to a developer meeting…

We have plans - and we have a schedule! - for what has to be done in respect of promotion and marketing for the upcoming  release and I am really curious about the results. So stay tuned for updates.

KOffice Web Concept

Things are in the move it seems and I am still all about drafting concepts for a renewal of the KOffice web presence. We have been discussing this on IRC a bit and it seems that quite some people liked the ideas, so I chose to present them here to give others the opportunity to think about it and maybe reuse it or make smart™ suggestions.

From simple to complex

My starting point was to find a solution to present KOffice independently without doubling maintenance work and spreading ressources even further on the net.

At the moment, everything KOffice is quite confusing: there is a terribly outdated (content wise) website that is pretty complicated to keep up to date with the use of SVN, a wiki that is hard to find and needs to be searched for everything and resources both on userbase and techbase. So we have actually four places where content is spread and that need maintenance. Not too clever, ey?

Now we have to start sorting things again.

I would like to see everything that feels like promotion on a landing page on koffice.org, this includes a generally introductory text about KOffice, a description of the single apps, the vision and maybe the KOffice team. Adding to that should be Latest news such as release notes and - in a prominent place - links to external ressources for both users and developers.

Outsourcing

That leads me to my next point: userbase and techbase. Those are highly useful and visible places and should host all the content that is likely to change frequently like tutorials, FAQs and other documentation. By moving content there, we make use of the already existing infrastructure and take quite some work away from the KOffice team to those maintaining the *base sites. Chances are good that this leads to better results and that we provide good tools for community interaction and user created content. Additionally, content becomes easier to find for those who already are familiar with the KDE infrastructure. But providing links on both ends will be mandatory and take make sure, nobody gets lost on the way.

Everything that is only useful to those who actually are closely involved to KOffice development - TODO lists, release schedules, internal discussions and general organisation - will stay on the current wiki. The developers seem to be happy with it and I don’t see a reason to move any of this content anywhere else. There is a enough to move around without this…

Now we only need to write fancy PR texts for the landing page and start moving and sorting content. *cough*

Lifestream

This will add some extra coolness to the whole concept and will be covered later when we have discussed things further. Stay tuned.

FlickrRSS workaround

Since I upgraded my wordpress install, the FlickrRSS plugin I used to show thumbnails of my photos at the top of my blog has stopped working. Nothing serious, just a bit annoying.

Over the weekend I took the time to finally get the pics back.

The Plugin still didn’t work, so I decided to throw out both the plugin and the associated PHP code in the main template. Instead I took the one flickr provides for badges, removed all the CSS that comes with it and kept only the single line of JavaScript, within which I changed the amount of shown thumbnails from 10 to 9. Then I wrapped a <div> around it to assign the former used style sheet again et voilà.

It looks exactly the way it did before and beautifies my template again. Isn’t that sweet?

And a hint to those who were wondering (or coming from a feedreader): it’s on the startpage of the blog, not on those pages that show one article only.