In an attempt to dust off my neglected blog, I bring you the following post about something that has been nagging at me for the past couple of days.
Since the recent changes at jabber.org I've been thinking a lot about Jabber from a new user's perspective.
The new web-based registration form may help clear up a lot of confusion that resulted from in-band registration (many users were looking for somewhere on the website to register), but after registration what do they do next?
They no longer need a client to register, and it is now quite likely that after registration they won't yet have one, so obviously most importanly we need to guide them to find a client.
We could simply direct them to the XMPP client list on xmpp.org, however that isn't particularly friendly for someone who might not even be familiar with the term "client".
What we need is a shortlist of some user-friendly clients, with good documentation.
And this set me thinking that perhaps there ought to be a concerted effort to document the basics of XMPP clients (in fact any and all XMPP software) in a unified way.
For each client I would like to see a set of simple single-page tutorials, complete with screenshots, on issues such as:
- How to register an account
- How to add an existing account
- How to add a contact
- How to join a MUC
- How to send/receive files
Where the pages would be hosted (in one place, or on the respective client sites) as well as some other things still need thinking about, but I'd like to know what other people think about the basic idea before setting anything in stone. Thoughts?
