'Getting started' user guide

@Goob I could set up a "John Doe" account on my localhost if you'd like. :)

@seantilleycommunit that would be really helpful. But thinking about it it might be best to decide what graphics we actually need to save you some work. It may be that we don't need as many graphics as there are on Diasporial. Let's discuss.

I'll try to get at least the first couple of parts up by this evening so you can have a look and see what you think.

I've placed Part I in this PiratePad document. I'll add to it over the next 24 hours.

Please, anyone who wants to help, read it and either suggest additions, corrections, and changes, or make your own changes to the PiratePad document.

(I notice it has added multiple spaces between some words when I pasted it in there, I think we'll just have to ignore those as removing them all will be a lot of work. I'll remove them all when we're finished editing.)

Thanks in advance for your help.

OK, I've finished the document, and the complete draft is on PiratePad. Please have a look at it and make your edits or make suggestions to me on this discussion.

One thing where there is potential confusion is that the term 'sharing' is used both for making connections (ie adding someone to your aspects) and for publishing content. Can you think of a good way to avoid any confusion over this?

Another question is: are there areas which are covered in too much detail in this getting started guide? If so, I could cut those down to make them more simple and place the more detailed information in a separate tutorial.

start sharing == adding to an aspect. You can put that if you want.

I've placed some mock-ups here with some draft images in place. See what you think, and let me know if any of it is not likely to be clear to a novice user, or if you spot any errors.

OK made some edits to the piratepad doc - mainly correcting some spelling stuff, some sentences I rewrote.

Excellent work except I have one issue maybe - it's just too long. A normal user will not read it. They might read the first section - but I'd bet only the most patient users will ever read the whole document. I think the point of a Getting Started guide is to be very, very brief, not going into details. A user manual goes into details and I think this is excellent work towards a proper user manual that is missing from Diaspora. However, this is not a getting started guide we should point users to when they sign up. We should have something very short - maybe even a video, explaining just a few core functionalities in brief and then telling them to find more details in the manual if they are interested.

I got almost to section 3 - will try to continue tomorrow :)

Thanks a lot, Jay. That's really useful feedback. I did wonder about how long it was getting... and I think you're right. It's probably worth editing/correcting what I've done, and then trying to extract the minimum information needed to get someone started, and the rest in a more detailed user manual which can be referred to later.

And it may be that my style is a little verbose...