I’ve been a mostly lurking member of Pixls.us since it’s creation. Even though I find some topics difficult to follow, I find its a great source of inspiration and learning.
However (you knew there was an ‘however’ coming) may I suggest some changes to the home page.
Articles although valuable hasn’t been added to in a while. First time users might be put off. Then onto Blog, which is even older (and not really relevant). By now, new arrivals might be put off. The jewel in the crown is the Discuss section but new users may have gone home by now.
Just a suggestion (if it can be done) change Articles to Play Raw and move this along the line. Drop Blog and make Discuss the first thing to come to.
I’m not sure about the Software section as some appear to be inactive.
Just my opinion but feel free to ignore - I won’t be hurt 
Contributing to the site is open to everyone who wants to provide articles and blog posts.
Why not you?
(and the you is everyone reading this)
(there is even a hugo branch for porting it over from the javascript one)
From my experience in running a couple of forums, you cannot force people to contribute. We had wiki pages (not updated) and blogs. I think in 20 years we had about three blogs (if that). We had a library that no one contributed to. The one thing everyone contributed was the online discussion and occasional polls.
Your last line is one of the reasons I would feel inadequate in writing an article - I don’t understand it!
Thanks for responding though.
nobody is talking about forcing anyone.
I am just pointing out that the site is open for contribution. But so far people are more busy with bitching about “no new content on the website”. And then we point out “you can also write content here” and we get crickets.
It is weird.
I’m not talking about forcing, probably not the best word from me, try encouraging people, horses to water and all that.
But there must be a reason why Articles and Blogs are not being contributed to. Is it because Pixls.us covers so many software packages? I still like the idea of PlayRaw having its own spot on the main page though. Its a very good learning tool for me.
Discuss is a very lively area with great contributors and the best thing in Pixls.us IMHO.
I haven’t seen people moaning about no new content (unless you mean me 
)
What does crickets mean?
Cheers
The original suggestion is about adapting the home page to reality. Your suggestion is about ‘changing reality’, encouraging people to contribute more content. That would be a good thing, sure, but I don’t think a sudden shift will occur, and people will start writing articles and blog posts. Therefore, I agree with @bminney’s suggestion: let’s promote the richest and most up-to-date source of information we have available: the forum.
While forums can help to solve problems in a discussion. A properly structured and written up article to summarize the solutions with pros and cons is way more efficient to read and understand. So no I do not think that the forums is a proper replacement for the website and that we should rather strive for helping to onboard more people as writers. If wanted we want even run a few “how to write for staticgen websites?” workshops.
So in a way it is not about changing reality. It is more about “not giving up on the reality that presents it self to us”
FWIW: this is my email signature
Always remember:
Never accept the world as it appears to be.
Dare to see it for what it could be.
The world can always use more heroes.
Be a hero.
My bookmark is to discuss dot pixls dot us. Confession: I’d forgotten there was anything else!
If it is just a question of putting discuss first, because it is the active and thriving part of the site, I’d have thought, why not. But I wouldn’t put priority on it, because I think that people who need to come here, through which ever piece of software is included in the family, do make it here.
Or… Perhaps we are just the chosen few, who pass the arduous test of clicking on enough links until the golden gates of discuss.pixls.us swing open 
My bookmark on my phone and pc is the discussion page. Perhaps the owners of the site (is it still Pat David?) should run some analytics to see where people head to.
We seem to being just fine as we are
With the current state of things, the home page does look a bit like a dead site. The reason I joined here is because Boris mentions it in his videos, but if I had stumbled here just from a web search I probably would have gotten the impression that it’s not very active.
That being said I do have a few skeletons of article ideas I could be convinced to turn into a formal article:
- My simple macro photography workflow (using darktable and from the perspective of using a manual flash and macro diffuser)
- My infrared workflow (using darktable, with some tips and tricks I’ve found for dealing with tricky situations)
- Writing a lua script to help me clean up my own mess (less of a technical how-to and more showing that I had a problem of my own creation that I solved with a lua script)
My big hold up is just lack of confidence that I’m any sort of authoritative voice on these topics.
Some other ideas could be simply re-posting YouTube videos or other blog posts with a brief summary, i.e. “In this video Boris covers the new AgX tone mapper module, how it solves certain problems, and how it compares to filmic rgb and sigmoid”. I think this is a mutually beneficial thing that elevates these creators to a more “official” standing, and it also bolsters the community since they are from the community.
I’m not sure that blogs and articles need to be separate things, at least not with the volume that there is currently.
We had hoped that the community would write things, and despite asking for many years, it just hasn’t materialized. That is OK, writing things is hard and time consuming.
I still reference some articles there and I do read them every so often to make sure they’re up to date, like the lensfun profiles articles.
But we aren’t trying that hard to drive traffic to the main site. There are no ads and it isn’t monetized (and we don’t want it to be).
I’d say that the work that I’ve seen on your Flickr page confirms that you can speak with confidence on a macro workflow. As a suggestion, you might consider opening this as a new topic so that others could offer their approaches and use that as a frame for a new article.
I believe that was part of the basis for the Highlight Bloom and Photoillustration Look article that tries to replicate the Dave Hill type illustrative look.
As you know, I do some macrophotography and I’d look forward to some interactive discussion on technique and workflow.
I believe both things can be true and agree with the OP.
- The forum is the main part of the community by now and where most things are happening, so it is a good idea to highlight it so the user would click it first upon opening pixls.us.
- It’s a good idea to nudge people to spend some time to write an article or a blog post on a topic they find interesting and the whole site would benefit as a result.
absolutely. It is just that asking the people who are already doing things (myself, darix, pat) to do more is… just not great. “Hey, can you do more of your volunteer work?”
But you do it so well…. 
Thanks, but I’m at a breaking point in life in general.
I understand and agree with you. I’m not sure if that was the intention of the OP. I saw it more as a call to arms for anyone who can do the work or has the authority to think/call the shots on these decisions.
Hopefully with this discussion people are now aware that they can contribute to the pixls.us homepage and someone picks up the bill
I think this is an interesting point and resonates with me somewhat. I sometimes have ideas for articles, videos or tutorials, but I don’t feel I’m enough of an expert to put it on this site. And I know there are some others out there who are making blogs and tutorials about the software featured on this site but are choosing to host it on their own platforms away from Pixls.
There may be various reasons for this, but I wonder if some are reluctant to fully open themselves to exposure and critique on this site. As Pixls is somewhat of a main hub for software like Darktable and RawTherapee, the feeling is that anything featured here must be authoritative and aligning with best practices, rather than more opinion-based and “this is how I personally do it”.
For me personally, I know this is my issue rather than a problem with the site, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it applies to others.
An example for me would be negative scanning and processing with Darktable – something I have done extensively, and I have helped some people on here with my experiences. But I’m not sure a tutorial by me would be a good idea, considering my workflow deviates substantially from the developer who created Negadoctor. His tutorials would be considered the “authority”, whereas mine would be “this is what works for me and might for you too”.
This is a bit of a rambling post, but I guess I’m just wondering what kind of ethos we would have for articles/posts that are from more “regular” users rather than the devs or designated experts (like Boris).
There is already plenty of material here on discuss that could be transformed into articles or blog entries. I noted as such in some threads, but people have yet to take the next step.
I would be happy to proofread and provide input if anyone has a draft sitting somewhere on their computer.