Blog About It

“Blog about it.” I’ve heard this a dozen or so times from Chris Messina; he tells me this whenever I complain that it’s difficult to learn how to manage a wiki, or cope with bad user documentation.

So when I started having trouble with a complicated knitting pattern — knitting patterns are notorious examples of very bad technical writing — I decided to see if anyone had blogged about it.

Sure enough, there are lots of blogging knitters (or knitting bloggers). Three of them had blogged about my troublesome pattern. And of the three, one had gotten nearly one-third of the way through the project, and her toddler had grabbed the edge of her knitting and used it to pull himself up, resulting in fifteen rows being unravelled.

As it happened, fifteen rows was about the amount I had to un-knit in order to get back to the point where the pattern had stopped making sense. Feeling less alone, I un-knitted the complicated rows of yarn-overs and knit-2-togs, and began again. The project is coming together nicely now.

So, maybe I’ll check around and see if anyone has blogged about trying to learn how to garden a wiki.

technorati tags: knitting, wiki gardening