How Do You Like the Notenik Knowledge Base?

Community Discussion
1

I’m looking for feedback about how well the Notenik Knowledge Base is working for you.

I guess this is sort of a three-part question.

  1. How well does the navigation work for you? I’m particularly interested in how well the navigational elements work while using the Web Book – especially since I’m using Notenik to do something similar for another site of mine: The Big Ideas in Software Development.

  2. How well does the organizational scheme work for you? In terms of the way content is sectioned and labeled.

  3. And finally, any suggestions for improving the actual content?

Very interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts.

Thanks!

2

In regard to presentation and usability, I think that Web Books are on par with web pages generated from Texinfo documents e.g. the GNU Emacs documentation. Overall, I think that the UX of Web Books is great (and shines on The Big Ideas in Software Development page).

The only thing that I’d recommend to aid navigation is to allow readers to return to the entire table of contents from section and sub-section pages. Notice how the Emacs docs allow users to access the table of contents and an index next to the links that take them forward and backward through the documentation. The more I use Notenik, the more I find myself referring to the Knowledge Base. Being able to access every page listed more quickly would be a lot of help when I’m deep in the weeds on a given aspect of the software. This page from The Big Ideas in Software Development is a great example of what I’m referring to.

I hope to return later with more insight on the other two questions, but this is the most complete piece of feedback that I have so far.

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3

Thanks for the feedback! This is very helpful.

There is a multi-level table of contents in the Knowledge Base – it’s just tucked away at the back, in the Reference section.

But I see your point about the Emacs manual having the ability to get back to such a thing from any page. I can see how that would be handy.

4

I see, I don’t frequent the References section too often. Thanks for the tip.

5

The Knowledge Base, and the example that it provides, is one of the things I like best about Notenik.

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6

Great! Thanks for the feedback!

7

I’m not a frequent user of the Knowledge Base but as you add new features to Notenik, I find myself relying on it to get a grasp of them. And that’s worked well for the sortable tables (wonderful new feature itself, BTW) and the text-format tag (another feature I put to use right away).

So it’s getting the job done for me, documenting what’s becoming a very powerful tool for text-based documents.

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8

Super! Glad to hear it!

9

Based on suggestions from @ThePrinter, I’ve made a few tentative changes to Notenik, and to the Knowledge Base.

I’ve uploaded the enhanced Knowledge Base to the web, so you can see it here. (The Notenik changes are not yet released, though.)

The Notenik enhancements add the ability to specify a header, a footer, and a nav bar for a Collection, to generally appear on every page.

I’ve added all three to the Knowledge Base. I don’t display the header or nav bar on the first page (because I’ve classified it as a title page), but all three appear on succeeding pages.

I’m using the nav bar to provide links to a complete Table of Contents, and to the Index. These links are accessible from every page (other than the title page).

Please look it over and let me know what you think. Looking forward to feedback!

Thanks!

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