Using blogs for sharing information.

I recently installed Wordpress on a Linux server and the Umbraco blog extension on a Windows server. However, both blog websites are not installed for blogging. I installed the websites for an FAQ and a support manual. But both aspects, blogging and documenting, can be combined and actually help the distribution of the information.

I used to work as an helpdesk agent and we had a huge web structure for documenting common questions and solutions. The problem was that each client had a different structure and the update process was slow. A blog has a fixed structure and is easy to maintain. Both problems solved :-) No it is not that easy, but this standard structure helps a lot.

One of the things with support manuals and FAQs is that they only start growing when the webapp is already online. But you still have to create something and keep it structured. And this can get messy very soon. So why not use a blog?

A blog is more then a website, it is a concept, a webpattern and this pattern solves some common issues. For example: how to publish time sensitive information or short items on a website. For the FAQs, all elements are available in your blog.

• Question <> Title
• Post content <> Answer
• Post ID <> id of the FAQ
• And categories.

The categories can be used to link the questions and/or the manual pages to a certain release or a section. And the ID can be used to call a page with a specific template if you want structured xml or html for including the content directly on the page (don’t know how to do this with Wordpress, but it is possible in Umbraco).

Now the only thing missing here is tagging. As the FAQ is run on the intranet, we cannot use del.icio.us but I found FreeTag. It is an open source php class that comes with an sql file to create the additional tables in your database. You can use it next to your own application database (Wordpress in this case) and the manual [PDF] provides some sample code on how to get the tags in and out of the database.
I am still playing around with it but it looks like it does the job: tag objects.

Now that we have a website ready, decided which theme to use, we can start to use it and distribute the information on it. The RSS function can be used to show the latest additions on the start page of the webapp. Similar to the tips you get when starting an application. Use one category news, and use this category RSS feed on the intranet. Anything is possible.
You can make people aware of this thing called RSS and deliver everything directly in their mailbox with one of the many aggregators (Attensa for example) out there. There is so much you can do with just a simple blog.