Margin note: A publishing dilemma

From time to time we revisit the our mechanism for publishing MacFixIt and look for ways to make solutions easier to find while preserving the content delivery method to which our regular readers are accustomed. We recently ran into a quandary on which we'd like to solicit some advice from you, our readers.

Essentially, the dilemma is as follows: We routinely publish multi-article series on MacFixIt. As new information about a particular problem or topic comes in, we create a new article covering the fresh data and link back to the previously published reports. In addition, for some major software and hardware releases or areas of special interest, we publish special reports. These aggregate all coverage on a particular topic and add new information as fit. For instance, Mac OS X 10.4.9 coverage is currently 14 articles deep and carries an accompanying special report, which is updated regularly with new information.

This system works reasonably well, and allows easy access to previous information while clearly delineating newly published content. It also offers a basic method for centralizing the troubleshooting content, so that a user visiting any given special report gets an overview of all problems and solutions related to a given hardware/software release or other topic of interest. The complication, however, is that a reader who finds a single article in the series through a search engine or other link does not necessarily have this birds-eye view of troubleshooting information, and hence may not find the appropriate solution.

For example, a user may find the seventh article in the Mac OS X 10.4.9 series -- which covers a system volume increase that some users find excessive even at the lowest setting -- through a search engine, but never see the tenth article in the series, which has an AppleScript that causes a reduction of system volume to a lower-than-normal setting. The reader may, in other words, miss an important fix by hitting only one entry point to our coverage. Though we link to the Mac OS X 10.4.9 special report from each article in the Mac OS X 10.4.9 series, there is no indication that a fix for the particular problem is located in the special report, and hence no real motivation to seek the information there.

In our initial brainstorming, we've come up with a few options for dealing with this problem:

• Keep aggregating content in special reports and linking to these reports from within each article in given series, hoping that readers seek out the information located therein.
• Do away with the article series format and instead persistently update a single article with new information as it becomes available (e.g. there would be only one Mac OS X 10.4.9 article that re-appears on the home page each time it is updated and contains all information related to the update). This would ensure that anyone finding articles through search engines or other links would have access pertinent content without having to seek elsewhere. The downside, however, is that readers visiting the site on a daily basis would have a hard time figuring out which content is new, and which has been previously published.
• Simply place all information that appears in new articles in the series at the bottom of each previous article in the series. For example, the seventh article in the Mac OS X 10.4.9 series would have the eighth through fourteenth articles attached (in entirety) as an addendum. This would put all pertinent content on one page for the visiting reader, but would also create an unwieldy presentation of content.

Unfortunately, none of these solutions seem to adequately address the concerns of easy access to all available fixes while retaining a daily "what's new" format; so we're seeking your input. How would you like to see the new information in a given string of coverage presented and organized for straightforward reference? One of the three options above, a modified version thereof, or something completley different? Please let us know your thoughts.

Ben Wilson
Chief Editor, MacFixIt

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