/me in a hurry

Born in 1977, I now live in Dresden/Germany and do work as a software engineer / systems architect / "head-of-dev" in a mid-sized company providing document management services for mid-sized and large construction projects. We mainly do server-sided Java, which I have been into for more or less six years by now, asides other languages (mainly Python, Perl and Unix shell scripting). Asides that, I am "internal NetBeans enthusiast" and have established NetBeans as the tool of choice for our internal development processes used both by regular developers and students. My main field in writing here right now is NetBeansStarterDe which is kind of a "mirror" of our internal German NetBeans documentation. Used to work with Eclipse ever since 2.something until completely switching to NetBeans in early 6.0 prereleases because of the maven2 integration.

out in the wild:

• blog: http://dm.zimmer428.net
• gallery: http://pictorial.zimmer428.net
• mail: kawazu <at> zimmer428 <dot> net
• collab: kawazu <at> share.java.net
• NetBeansStarterDe
• CommunityDocs_DE
• 'shirt guy': http://blogs.sun.com/branajam/entry/kristian_rink_docs_contributor ;)

• Snippets:
  • Code Template Backup
  • Auto-build maven2 projects in the correct order

Drafts and snippets - NetBeans Community Docs structure, wiki layout, ...

(0) General concepts

• Resources should primarily be spent on writing and maintaining documentation content:
  • Adding new and updating existing contributions should be as easy as possible.
  • The amount of "different" resources (blogs, newsletters, ...) spread all around the net should be reduced to a bare minimum, making use of "tooling technologies" (RSS?) wherever possible. Virtually every of the resources existing here so far, at the moment, should be evaluated in terms of its use and effort required to keep them updated.
  • Best case would be to have everything on (wiki.)netbeans.org?

(1) make CommunityDocs the project "anchor" / starting page

• move most of the stuff currently in there out of the way
• use this page for the "monthly"(?) newsletter and other important news by simply adding them "to the top" of the page featuring timestamp, ..., allowing for people to subscribe to the pages RSS feed to have updates on this page made available easily (eventually eliminating the need to have http://nb-community-docs.blogspot.com/ around?)
• eventually this page should only be editable to some "dedicated" editor doing, i.e., monthly / weekly newsletters, important news flashes, ...?

(2) re-organize the contribution list and the language-specific sub-pages

So far we have an extensive contribution list on CommunityDocs, along with localized / translated pages like NBCDArticles_ES. While this structure is pretty much what we need, I think initially it is, from an organization point of view, too heavy (either a contributor needs to add a new contribution to multiple places, or someone else needs to regularly keep all these things in sync). Proposing a new "contribution list" structure like this:

This should go to a separate "Contributions" wiki page, again to allow for external users subscribing to its RSS feed to see what has just changed recently. Note a couple of things:

• I want to introduce the "tags" rather than the "category" at the moment, eventually this could some day help us getting this stuff sorted automatically (if we can get the wiki system to do so) into the sub-wikis along with the language information.
• The date of creation should IMHO be dumped; this information easily enough is to be found in each of the pages itself and its presence in here just consequently would require "date of latest update" to be here.