[ic] IC Catalog-Building Tutorial available

BF meinbuch@mein-buch.com
Sat, 13 Jan 2001 00:39:49 -0500 (EST)


Nice job ! What an easy and friendly tutorial for the beginner. If
Akopia would write in this fashion a detailed documentation/tutorial of
all its fancier features, it would certainly have something to sell to the
common (wo)men. 

As you already have a page-wise display of your good stuff, why
not sell the documentation per page ? A dime for the easy
stuff, a dollar for a bit more, and of course for Mike Heins' tips
and tricks you will have to break your bank, and forget about the
usertags, you need to get a loan to buy them...but...it's worth
it. (Just kidding - just being happy to see some nice work).  

I have an idea.

May be you demonstrate the fancier stuff exactly by letting the
user build a fancy documentation catalog, combining content management 
features of a technical textbook-style documentation with a shopping cart
selling the documentation's text pages per page/chapter/tag/code snippet.

Imagine a szenario where no user could get the source code, unless he
had gone through the tutorial of making a fancy documentation catalog.
That would solve three problems in one strike. 

First the user would really have to build one catalog from scratch
guided by the tutorial for building a "documentation catalog". 

Second the user would really have to read the documentation, because
he needs to type the text once to build the catalog pages during the
tutorial's session. No more users who haven't read the docs. That should
be something Mike Heins would love, right ? 8-)

Third, Akopia could finally sell something aside from the consultancies. 
How about incorporating the project of building a documentation catalog
into an online/in-class training program ? Could be very effective and
you could offer much more detailed information, as people would pay
for it.

I think that would be a nice way of honoring the work, which went into
writing the IC code and documentation and an effective way of teaching
people its features, scope and flexibility. 

The source code would stay open, the documentation more than free (once
the user has learned how to build the documentation catalog, he also knows
how to add his own future changes of the docs to that catalog), without
being "priceless", because it isn't. 8-) 

Cheers,
Birgitt