Yes, it might be somewhat daunting (“what do I know”), but heck, I have been blogging for over two decades[1], so I should be able to smith some words…
If and when I manage to make some time, I might for example roll the recent how to determine focal length thread into an article, as there are multiple views on the subject and I found it an interesting discussion. I’m sure there’s more threads like that, that could be made into a “here’s some viewpoints and possibly a conclusion” type of article or blog post. Is there a clear split between what goes into blog and what goes into articles?
In Dutch, so blogging in English would be somewhat new. ↩︎
(and if there’s a pressing desire to move things to Hugo — I do have some experience with that, so maybe I might be of service in that regard. Is there a repo I could gawk at, or is that not public?)
Perhaps it is not unusual, individual websites are usually strong in only one form of content, for example, in longer articles or in forum discussions. If both forms exist, different people often participate in them. This seems to be the natural state of things.
and yes doing write ups and great threads would be an excellent way to create more content. Did you know that discourse has wiki posts which you can use for collaboration on posts? ( we can add a category for it if needed )
also dont worry on getting it right on the first try.
there will be reviews when merging it in git
pssst Totally a secret dont tell anyone. You can fix things after it is published.
So feel empowered to start writing posts. got questions? let us know.
Yes, it’s painful when my browser forgets the discuss favourite and I end up at that bloody goat all the time (sorry whoever’s picture that is but a close up of a goat has weird and not entirely positive connotations).
But the site, discussion section actually, is an “advert” and a major draw for Darktable, IMV.
Yeah, me, too, I guess. (I say that with a bit of dread as I’m a fussy bastard and not very fast). I am a (hack) editor for work.
One thing I’d just add is that unless a site is updated very regularly, then people won’t come back to it, IMV. The second time they come back in a couple of weeks (even days) and nothing’s changed, they’ll just think there’s nothing going on there. In that sense I think the discuss page should be the landing page because there’s always stuff going on. On the flip side, it may not be that easy to digest for beginners but neither is the current landing page. I don’t know if there’s a way to pin tutorials in a banner at the top of the page or something… and, yes, I realise this is probably like saying, “oh, can’t we just move all the city subway stations a little bit to the left.”
Word of advice: Just start writing. It may turn out to be utter horse shit that you never publish, but it will improve your writing skills, and it helps you to get clarity on points you don’t know much about and pushes you to learn more. It may also turn out great, of course.
As long as you can justify what you’re doing, I don’t think that’s a problem.
Yeah, it’s good advice to just vomit words onto the screen as quickly as possible and revise during the n+1 drafts (says the guy who often sits for an hour crafting the “perfect” lead before moving on to slowly crafting the “perfect” second sentence).
An important part of writing is to find out who we are writing for.
Think that lot of people come here because they don’t know very much about image software etc and want to learn. So it doesn’t need to be “authoritative” to be of value for many. Stuff of the “this is how I understand/do it” kind, is much better than nothing.
My suggestion is that if one is unsure of correctness, language or whatever, why not post a message in the forum and inform what kind of draft one has created and ask if there are others that are willing to review/contribute – or put the whole draft in a post and ask for comments – before it is finally put up as an article/blog.
this is bit like the Cathedral and the Bazaar. and given that most of the software discussed here is free software, most everyone likes the bazaar model better as more can participate. The forums provide that medium for the community ease of access and participation.
What might jump-start the writing process for potential authors would be a list of topics of interest for authors to consider. Perhaps a poll of topics for uses to vote on to gauge interest in subjects?
If you think something is interesting, write about it. Everyone wants more and more stuff before they do anything… but like, just do it. That’s the great thing about Free Software and this community, just show up and do it.
Someone just shared a blog post about file/folder naming and there was a whole discussion that came from it. Just. Do. It.
I’m not here because Pat and Darix tracked me down and said “wow you might be adequate at this” … I am here because I came here and I did things, I participated, I just started doing it.
On the other hand, I only remember about once or twice a year that the main pixls.us exists (usually either to refresh my memory on what packages are available for a particular purpose or to make a donation). There is no longer anything on the discuss pages to point to the “main” part of the site beyond the “Donate” link. As a result, I think that, for new users, the trip from pixls.us to discuss.pixls.us can quickly become a one way trip.
The “main” part of the site might be a little less like a ghost town if there are prominent links to it from discuss.pixls.us. I think the pixls user community has chosen to view discuss as the focal point of the site, and the other parts will flourish or languish in direct proportion to how visible they are from discuss.
Just a headsup, there are some broken links in that site, for example the GIMP link redirects to https://staging.pixls.us/www.gimp.org which doesn’t work
It’s great that people are discussing, in the discussion section where we all live, how to get people to write more articles. However, given the amount of effort needed to maintain a live, frequently updated home page over the long term, we should also consider making the pages that have actually existing traffic more prominent or the landing zone for newbies
I guess I contributed some articles. I’m getting old and tend to forget things I don’t do every day. So I need to write them down. One way was to write articles for https://pixls.us. Simply don’t keep them to myself, make it also useful to others.
I’m a guy who just does things. At least for topics I’m really interested in. This is how it works. You either contribute or you don’t.
You can try to promote that, but I don’t think you will get much from it. The only way is normally paying for articles …
Not that I can’t improve, but it’s actually my full-time job to write, so I don’t really need practice at that aspect of it. It’s more the actual content, technical knowledge and whether my way of doing things would be considered good advice, worthy of being on this site, where I have less confidence.
It’s also a question of time for me right now, in that I don’t have a lot of it. But you’re right that just putting things down on paper is often the best way to get your thoughts in order and gauge whether something is worthy of sharing or not.
