One of the more ambitious ideas I have for the next release of Carbide is to throw all of the public Carbide docs onto a website using the Eclipse Infocenter. One of the drivers to do this is to make the information available to Google searches. Most people, including myself, have developed the habit of simply doing a Google search for anything we want and simply ignoring our local resources. In many cases I believe that people sometimes actually forget that they have product documentation on their machine. And let's face it, searching the web has become both a habit and the way things are done.

When I actually thought a bit about my behavior and why I preferred a Google search over simply opening the help system on my computer I realized that it was the chance that a more interesting link would appear in the search results. One that would grab my interest and add another small bit of interesting trivia into my knowledge base while pretending to actually complete my task. In short, its fun to learn new things and the web makes it so easy to find interesting tidbits to savor.

So, to make it easier for Carbide users to find the information they want, it behooves us to make it available on the web. So over the next few Agile sprints we'll do a setup of the Infocenter, figure out how to merge it into our build process so it gets updated automatically, then do some internal testing before releasing it to the beta group for pounding. The end result is that by the time the next release of Carbide is available, the Online Carbide Help (working title) site will be public and in use.

Lots of work but I think a Carbide 'feature' you will appreciate.

But I need to know, do you think this is a useful feature to push for? Will it make the docs more helpful to you? How often might you use something like this? Am I imagining the impact this will have? Am I a megalomaniac to think this might be useful? Have I finally gone too far?

Inquiring minds want to know.