Jolt Country

One of my resolutions this year is to get back to the original purpose of the Hugonomicon, which was to serve as a combination news/learning tool (mostly documenting my experience learning Hugo).

In addition to the usual suspects, like lack of time due to school and work commitments most of last year, part of my ongoing struggle with the site has been in dealing with PostNuke, the CMS that runs the site.

All of this is a longwinded way of getting to the question: any suggestions on software for the site? In the beginning, an all-in-one solution seemed to be what I was after: I had grand and glorious dreams of active forums, daily updates, and comprehensive downloads. Now, there are two forums for Hugo development (this one and the Developer's Lab at Kent's Future Boy! site), so a third seems a bit like overkill. I currently host all of the Hugo software that can also be found on the IFArchive, plus a few others that aren't. Perhaps this isn't necessary, so a simpler software solution would be ideal.

What would y'all like to see on the Hugonomicon?

Hugella wrote:What would y'all like to see on the Hugonomicon?

Well, one thing I can think of would be tutorials or tips and tricks about the language. For example, for a game I am looking at writing I had to add directions for fore, aft, port, and starboard. Simple to do, really - but it might benefit others to have a place where they can easily see "tips" for how people did things.

I am not sure of a format for that right now.

I guess you could argue that these "tips and tricks" and tutorials could be put here but the overall board is not dedicated to Hugo and that might defocus the Hugo-specific elements. Further, you would then be relying on the person to search through and find what they want admidst a series of potentially unrelated threads. Not necessarily a massive problem, I realize.

Plus I think perhaps some breakdowns of how certain aspects of Hugo work might help. This would sort of be like what you were doing: taking parts of the manual (or just parts of interest) and writing up "articles" about those particular things -- just without, perhaps, the trappings of PHP Nuke and all that stuff. My general heuristic for this kind of thing is to keep the content as simple as possible and to keep how the content is presented as simple as possible. A lot of times coming up with a content management system is difficult when you are not sure what form(s) the content itself can or will take.

- Jeff

Another thing I can think of is perhaps using the site as a vehicle for keeping track of bugs that people find in the official builds. That way everyone can keep track of things and know what things are still issues. Other people could also check if a reported bug seems to actually be a bug or a mistake on the part of the person (like my "sound issue" post, which appears to have been an error on my part).

As a corollary to that, a set of executable code could be posted that can be run against each build. This would sort of be the "unit test" for any Hugo build. If someone is reporting problems, they can download and run the sample code.

Further, perhaps the site can serve as a place where we, as Hugo users, suggest possible updates to the library or the tool. For example, perhaps some of us come up with classes that we think would be a good addition to the library. Or perhaps we come up with functionality that we feel might benefit from being part of the library.

Another would be documenting a sort of version history of Hugo. Yes, I know this already exists on the IF Archive but making a format on the site itself might also be helpful.

Cryptonomic wrote:Another thing I can think of is perhaps using the site as a vehicle for keeping track of bugs that people find in the official builds.

Yeah, that would be very handy.

Although!! I should say that when I finished up Necrotic Drift there weren't any Hugo issues that I knew about. I was programming in, for the first time in my life, the Perfect Language. It was beautiful and I loved it.

The next thing I tried to do was DirectX 9 in C#, which was (is?) so horribly broken that the installer doesn't even work right. The installer! I will now laugh the dark laugh of ages at the people responsible for this.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

The idea of mini-comps as a way to inspire us to write has appealed to me in the past, but I've always come to the conclusion that such a thing would be unfair to people like ICJ who actually manage to get shit out without added incentive.

Maybe a better alternative would be to have a weekly Hugo coding problem so that we can check in, figure out ourselves how we'd do the problem during the week, and have answers (and new question) posted the next week.

Cryptonomic,

Great suggestions. I think I'm going to go with some sort of blogware for the new incarnation of the site; the portal/*nuke mentality is really much more than I need or want.

Bug tracking: I've done a little bit of this on Hugonomicon, but what would really be ideal is a bug tracker. That way one can see in an instant what's already been discovered or fixed, without having to trawl through past entries (which may or may not indicate the current status of said bug.) Kent, if you read this, whaddya say? Actually, I could probably set one up myself. Hmmm....

Version tracking/history: This could be done easily enough ( think.)

The whole Hugonomicon project started from the desire to see better user documentation/resources, especially for beginners. It'd be ideal to one day produce something along the lines of the IBG or Eric Eve's 'Getting Started With TADS 3'.

Anyway, thanks for your input, guys. I think I just needed a reminder of my focus.

Roody,

That'd be awesome...'the Great Online University of Hugo.'

However, I'm not the one to produce such 'tests' (being sorely in need of such things myself), but would be glad to host/post/moderate them.

For what it's worth, I don't expect the developer forum on the FB site to be much more than a launching pad answering basic development questions for people introduced to Hugo via FB itself. The format of the single forum for Hugo on the FB site isn't really the ideal means for handling longer term, in-depth discussion, analysis, tips, code samples, and supplemental/introductory/improved documentation.

Also, we could have a carousel-coding-responsibility thing where a chunk of code gets handed from person to person every week. He or she codes a new room and is randomly given a task to code within that room, like a somewhat-tricky lockable object or a television or whatever we want.

Hugella wrote:The whole Hugonomicon project started from the desire to see better user documentation/resources, especially for beginners. It'd be ideal to one day produce something along the lines of the IBG or Eric Eve's 'Getting Started With TADS 3'.

I agree. That is part of what I wanted to start with the idea of a tutorial format. I have since been rethinking a little about how I did the tutorial. What I would like to do now is actually start more with classes. Then show deriving object types from those classes. That would lead to, perhaps, room types. Then I would focus on the directions between rooms. I would not go off on tangents, as I did in my first attempt, but rather save the tangents for later parts -- adding to the already existing code base.

Further, beyond the full-scale assault of a tutorial, I think of Roger Firth's page for Inform (specifically the InFact, InFancy, etc, sections). Those are sort of focused "lessons", if you will, into the specifics of Inform. I think Hugo might benefit from something like that as well.

The tutorial(s) could then reference those "lessons" and even the tips and tricks can point to parts in the tutorial where the tip or trick is used in a full example.

Further, I think getting the Hugo Manual in a Web-based format would be good. Not a direct conversion; rather, a true porting of the manual into HTML, with images to perhaps clarify some concepts (like parent/child hierarchies). Then tutorials, tips/tricks, and lessons could all reference the relevant section in the now on-line manual.

Again, these are all just thoughts piddling around in my mind so treat them with the grain of salt they probably deserve. The goal (for me) is to attract more people to Hugo initially; to give Hugo the "spit and polish", as it were, that these languages seem to need in terms of ancillary or supporting material so that people will be drawn to the language and see it is a viable alternative. Eventually I could see HugoComps or something following from that.

- Jeff

Roody_Yogurt wrote:The idea of mini-comps as a way to inspire us to write has appealed to me in the past, but I've always come to the conclusion that such a thing would be unfair to people like ICJ who actually manage to get shit out without added incentive.

Hey, if the bunch of us are considering a Hugo Easter Mini-Comp Sampler or something like that, then consider me in!

A Hugo Mini-Comp sounds fun! I haven't been doing much of anything on my Spring Thing entry (sigh), so I might be interested in something like that.