I've been following this blog called Creating Passionate Users for a while. It's by the people who write the “Head First” books. Now I've never actually read any of their books, but I did use the amazon preview to check them out. Wow. Wish I'd had textbooks like that in school. The books are amazing at presenting information. It's hard to explain, but the format and style of the presentation just plugs right into your brain.
Anyway, I started following the blog and they spend a lot of time describing the psychology behind their text production. Well I was really taken with it and wanted to try it out. I used some of the ideas for a tutorial/article about CSV and IP address location. Of course, my attempts are pretty woeful in comparison, but here's the interesting thing – it was a lot more fun to write than most of my documentation. I've posted before about the real difficulties of producing decent API documentation. And this “Head First” stuff looks like a good way to tackle the problem.
Today, they have just posted a great little article summarising the main points of their approach. If you read nothing else in the blogosphere today, read this, it's worth it.
