Haunted manuals, or hauntology and bitrot

Hi friends,

I always forget something. Like I forgot to send a newsletter when there was a new blog post for (checks watch) almost two months. Oops. Sorry about that.

To make it up to you, I give you a whole nifty series I've been working on for the last three weeks. Start here and keep going (there are 3 in the series so far):

Haunted manuals You've heard of the curse of knowledge, but could your manual be haunted as well?

Here's a little excerpt:

When I say some manuals are haunted, I'm not talking about an instance of a particular manual like the Diesel D318 that has been touched and used and marked up and perhaps even bled on. I am talking about the content of the manual. A GitHub README can be haunted. A Word document left behind by a former coworker on their last day can be haunted. An instructions tab in a spreadsheet can be haunted. (A spreadsheet can be haunted, but maybe that's another topic.)

It's an ongoing series and I've added a little navigational element at the bottom of each one. If you're the kind of person who waits until a whole book series is released before you read it, you might want to wait until this Friday, when I hope to wrap it up.

In the mantime, you could also check out another post I wrote since I last wrote (as it were), which seemed to resonate with the technical writing and knitting crowd. Maybe that's not exactly a crowd, but if you're in it, you'll probably like User stories for legible knitting patterns: Knitting patterns could be a lot more legible and enjoyable to use if they broke free of the constraints of print.

That's it for this catch-up episode. From now on, I'm going to try to send the newsletter at the same time as I merge the PR with the blog post. The cost of that is that I won't write as much of a cute intro and you'll see the typos before the next mornings fixit PRs. But I think that's better than not sending you a newsletter at all for months.

See you on the internet!

AK