Re: debiantutorials.org seeks input and new blood

[Steve Kemp <skx@debian.org>]

On Fri Apr 24, 2009 at 08:14:52 -0400, machiner wrote:

> This list is not exclusive to developers.  Many people read it.  Sure, I'd love a
> dev or 2, and I clearly asked, to contribute to the site.  Why wouldn't I?  But, I'd
> be just as happy, and I think the community the site serves would be as well, if
> anyone would give up a couple hours of their life to "donate" to the site.

  A couple of years ago I setup debian-administration.org
 because I thought there were a need for such a thing for
 myself if for nobody else.

  At that time the Debian wiki was mostly empty, and the "competition"
 was lacking.

  People mentioned my site previously in this tread, and whenever the
 topic comes up people seem to speak reasonably highly of it - but
 while I think that having community sites is a good thing, but I also
 believe that unless you're doing something very niche, very specialized, or
 very strongly focused additional sites really do serve to fragment users.

  Were my site not already present I'd not start it now - instead I'd
 post to the wiki, or other sites.  (The wiki is nice, but it isn't
 a perfect medium because people cannot post questions, leave comments,
 etc.  I do think that "forum-like" sites are valuable for that reason
 if no other.)

  Having said that even if you have a site that contains a single
 page of good content and somebody stumbles upon it, solving their
 problem, it is hard to regard that as a failure.

  In short - keep up the work, if it is useful it will attract
 visitors, and be indexed by engines, and some day you might save
 people a lot of time.

  My only specific suggestions for your site in particular would be:

    a.  Never rely on outside contributors.  My site, sadly, has
       more people writing than contributing by at least 1000:1 and
       I think that is common.

    b.  If you could "declutter" and "cleanup" the site more people
       would enjoy it.  I found it overly complex, and some of the
       language used was both inflammatory and childish.

Steve
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