Saturday, August 21, 2010

Amarok Quick Start Guide in Translation

Thanks to the hard work of the wonderful Amarok Promo Team, we now have the beginning of the Amarok Handbook completed, and in the able hands of the KDE Translation team (http://userbase.kde.org/Amarok/QuickStartGuide). It's quite exciting to see the completed pages roll in on #kde-www. Neverdingo has written a wonderful blog post about the procedure: http://neverendingo.blogspot.com/2010/08/amarok-translatons.html. If you love Amarok, and have ever thought about translating, now is the time to step up! This is going from our small team, to the larger team of KDE, and it is thrilling to see.

I guess we did something unusual, beginning our Handbook in the KDE wiki system. I'll have to say that comparing the process to our old way, which was using Google Docs -- it is like night and day. The one advantage of Gdocs is that you can tell who is also editing, and what they are doing, but we got around that, for the most part, by communicating in our IRC channel. There is simply nothing better than seeing your document take place marked up and looking professional! Wiki markup isn't complicated, and the guides (http://userbase.kde.org/EditMarkup and http://userbase.kde.org/Typographical_Guidelines) are easy and helpful to use.

I will never again use Google Docs for more than just text. The wiki rules! Userbase is awesome! Thank you, thank you, KDE.

I understand the next bit of this process is the DocBook markup, which sounds mysterious and scary still, since I don't know much about it. There is a guide to that as well, which I'm sure I'll be consulting often. For now, though, we'll concentrate on finishing the rest of the Handbook, for those who need more detail about the finer points of using the best music program of all time, AMAROK!

Thank you Mamarok, and Willem, Nightrose and Pete, Abhi and Adrián, Emilio and Dima for all your work. You've been GREAT.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for using Userbase, it's clearly a nice iniciative.
    As for the docbook parts, you don't necessarily need to do anything about it. The export gets done automatically. There might be some adjustments needed, but the process is not entirely clear yet. But i guess that is more an admin job ;)
    So just keep the ball rolling content with some nice amarok articles :P

    Cheerio,
    Ingo

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  2. Ingo, thanks so much for the complement, and that good news! We are already at work on the rest of the Handbook, for sure.

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