How to share and document hobby projects today? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: HattedSquirrel
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: October 02, 2020, 09:36:33 pm
content: I am wondering what is the best way to share and document your elaborate hobby projects in the modern times?I often do quite comprehensive projects in my spare time that include electronic design files, 3D printing models, source code, sewing patters and much more in a single project. And I don't feel IG, Twitter or Fabebook is the right platform to share such stuff. But what is it today?Initially I thought a blog for progress reports and static sites for finished projects was a good way to go, looked into Wordpress and fell into despair after a few weeks because nothing worked even remotely as I wanted it to. Tutorials seem to target very different use cases. So I started looking at websites of other makers, to see how they do it. But all I found is: They are all deserted and/or broken.Examples?eevblog.com Go to Projects->µSupply. The layout falls appart. Then look at the comments of any entry that works: Mostly spam.maker.pro Updates several times a week, but zero likes and comments. In many articles the images are missing.simonegiertz.com Website works but is merely more than 5 links to external sites.If feels so weird. Like in a post-apocalyptic movie. Some automatism still pushes content to websites that nobody cared for since decades. They slowly fade away in the online equivalent of an abandoned factory complex.So my question stands:What is a good way to make your own hobby projects publicy available if you are not going full business and therefore can't invest the time effort and hard work into beeing in every possible youtube collaboration and every possible podcast with merch store and all the other hard publicity work?

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2020, 11:04:53 pm
content: Interesting question. And I don't have a good answer.An example: if you share a circuit here on eevblog, you'll be attacked by people who do not understand the friendly concept of sharing, but just want to boost their own ego:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/oshw/how-to-programmable-divide-by-n-counters-using-standard-logic/On top of that with an overly pretentious user name.I've not found another place for sharing this kind of stuff, but am still looking.

author: greenpossum
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 02, 2020, 11:10:54 pm
content: Have a look at hackaday.io Nice community there.

author: tkamiya
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 12:53:56 am
content: Hackaday main website; however, has a very abusive culture. Just read some comments (to some projects) and you'll see.

author: Electro Fan
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 01:00:20 am
content: This looks pretty good.https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/120757gpu-fpga-project/It’s not mega fancy, feature rich, and super flexible in terms of what you can do with the layout but the price is pretty affordable and you start with some amount of likely interested and knowledgeable users.If you want more publishing control you will probably have to undertake more publishing/mgmt responsibility. Maybe look at hosting packages that give you lots of site/blog feature templates and editing capabilities but that don’t require coding everything from scratch. The challenge would be in attracting visitors.If you build your own site/blog you might open a thread with some ongoing updates/Q&A here in the Other Blogs section so you can make it easy to stay connected to EEVers.

author: greenpossum
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 01:06:22 am
content: Quote from: tkamiya on October 03, 2020, 12:53:56 amIf you mean hackaday.com I don't bother with it.

author: Electro Fan
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 03:16:48 am
content: This is a very good site here at EEVblog - good users, content, forum organization, moderation. Maybe there is a need or opportunity for Dave to add a few tools to help users better blog projects. Maybe people could suggest what those tools might be.

author: DrG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 04:06:42 am
content: You may want to consider just using your own website.There are sites, in addition to those already mentioned where you can write project articles, and even make a few bucks. You may, however, find yourself severely restricted in size and format. Other sites like Arduino project hub are a consideration, but people can repackage them and put them elsewhere. I sometimes think that sites are content mad and will just take whatever they can get, wherever they can get it.I linked to this site a while ago and it serves as a good examplehttps://geoffg.net/I don't know him, but I enjoy the site and bookmarked with a 'good' my keyword to find certain bookmarks in what has become an undeniable mess.I think that your own website offers you the best flexibility since it is a personal endeavor and may get very detailed and evolve and so on. Just my US$ 0.02

author: MosherIV
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 09:47:03 am
content: What about instructables.com ?I believe some also use github.com, obviously more for code based projects.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 09:53:56 am
content: A classical static web page hosted anywhere capable of hosting static html and picture files. This has worked for decades and will work for decades to come. Trend solutions tend to suck while still trendy, and then be completely forgotten in a year or two.Github or similar for revision-controllable design files.EEVblog forum for discussion. Project-speficic thread works well.If you have a very large and complex project, expecting multiple developers and hunderds of socially active users, install your own forum.No instructables. Totally unusable user experience, you can get better user experience by paying them money. As a result, most projects there are by idiots.

author: capt bullshot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 11:25:07 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on October 03, 2020, 09:53:56 am+1 on this.Place your content on your own website, and post links to the projects here, and maybe some of the other sites mentioned here.

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 12:13:08 pm
content: Quote from: Electro Fan on October 03, 2020, 03:16:48 amYes, absolutely.QuoteNo, please. This isnota blogging site, but a forum. It is meant for dialog, not for a stream of daily updates on your project. We have had some of those threads, where one user presents a monologue of post after post, and in my opinion that's a misuse of this (or any) forum. Plus, the linear sequence of posts does not really offer a good way to present comprehensive information on complex projects.I agree with what others have suggested: Use your own, static website to present content, use this forum (or other relevant platforms) for dialog, and to make people aware of your project.Personally, I like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) as a tool to generate static websites. It lets you define your sites's content via easily edited Markdown files, the site structure and layout via pre-defined templates, and cosmetic appearance via standard CSS style sheets. Hugo runs locally on your computer and generates a set of standard static HTML pages to upload to a web server. No active components are online, so it's secure without any maintenance, and should be future-proof.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 01:01:18 pm
content: www.eevblog.com/forumgithub or gitlab .comhackaday.ioinstructables.compersonal blog, personal website (might add some maintenance and/or owning extra costs)

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 01:23:43 pm
content: My vote is for a static web page. You can register a domain name and have it hosted for pretty cheap, actual fees will obviously depend on the amount of traffic. I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I currently have nothing on my site there and it costs only about $12 a year to keep it active just in case I need it.

author: HattedSquirrel
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: October 03, 2020, 03:11:45 pm
content: Thank you all for your ideas and indeed helpful input. Pretty clearly everybody suggestes a personal static page. It is also good to hear which sites like-minded people visit. I'll try your suggestions and see what works best for me.So, my new current plan is: I'll continue my efforts in building a personal web page as primary repository. I'll then post some of my projects to the sites you suggested, including this forum. That way I'll get some feedback and discussion going and don't have to worry if one of the external sites goes down, breaks or if my content simply gets lost between all the other contributions. Sounds good to me@DrG Yes, I like the design of Geoff's page, too. Mislead by the grandiouse advertisement claims of "simple and complete customization" of both, suqarespace and wordpress, I thought it must be easy to get something to work with several static pages in different categories and an expanded menu on the left and have them doing all the SEO and stuff. Oh boooooy was I mistaken.Three weeks deep into the rabbit hole I slowly come to the realization it could indeed be quicker to learn how to do SEO, social integration and resposiveness on my own than delaing with millions of poorly documented plugins. ;-) (I stopped staying up to date with my HTML skills just before HTML5 was first released in 2008. There's a lot for me to catch up on.)@eblaster Thanks for the tip, I'll give hugo a try.

author: Electro Fan
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 12:32:39 am
content: Quote from: ebastler on October 03, 2020, 12:13:08 pmTechnically, this is a forum inside EEVblog.QuotePoint well taken.But, just sayin', if Dave wanted to add blog-like tools to, for example, just the project forum or to a separate/new "blog forum", users with more in-depth and/or ongoing projects could post their projects there and users who only want dialog could converse in all the other forums. Not sure what the downside would be if the dialog nature (which is very valuable and enjoyable) is preserved in general. If we look at the arc of information tools it's pretty clear that more information rich content in various forms becomes increasingly the norm. If EEVblog doesn't want to seed an opening for a competitor it might want to keep the door open to some new level of publishing/information management. No doubt, simple can be elegant but I wouldn't completely dismiss adopting tools that make previously difficult tasks easier. What makes EEVblog special (in addition to Dave and the concept) is the user community. EEVblog has built something pretty great, for sure. But as great as it is there will always be some tension between preserving the status quo and moving in a direction that opens new opportunity. If people want to go deeper on projects and it doesn't impede the flow of other threads, tools/capabilities that make it possible could attract still more thoughtful/helpful/friendly/enthusiastic users. More users more content, more content more users. Appropriate organization and tools could keep the desirable attributes and allow for new growth. Just some thoughts. No need to rush into anything. We could start with drag and drop re-ordering of attachments, or some such thing.

author: basinstreetdesign
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 01:55:28 am
content: Quote from: HattedSquirrel on October 02, 2020, 09:36:33 pmIt sounds like you just want to do what I do: share your experience building/hacking something for the sake of the educational factor with links to possible open-source hw/sw. I didn't want the hassle/expense of dealing with html creation or maintaining my own fully custom site but wanted to share what my experiences were. Being able to add to the post(s) from day to day or week to week was desireable without having to maintain many pix or other documents on someone else's site was needed for me.What I do is to thoroughly document my projects and post the pictures to imgur.com as analbumwith much explanations of what each picture is all about. Imgur.com will also host short videos as part of the album. Source material can be put in github or similar, though to be honest I have never done that, yet.When you want tobragdisplay your progress then just post a short description and a link to the album on a site like here. Here's one:https://imgur.com/a/Buj8WfDOr if you are into radio restoration, as I am, then maybehttps://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/index.phpis better.I have a few projects on instructables.com, such ashttps://www.instructables.com/Tube-Power-Supply/but I have found that the moderators there don't like the use of ad-hoc materials or design-on-the-fly. They prefer a "recipe" approach using materials that can be readily had from several suppliers such as DigiKey. I was taken to task over my use of the phrase "what I had laying around" to solve a problem. But it is just that kind of thinking on your feet that I enjoy while building a project.Good luck!

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2020, 03:27:35 am
content: Please run your own site, the mods have enough job here.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2020, 09:29:25 am
content: Quote from: MosherIV on October 03, 2020, 09:47:03 amYou mean destructables?Are there any good projects on that site?Most of the ones I've seen there contain big errors, which render them minimally functional and often dangerous, such as the one which uses germicidal, UVC lamps for photoresist exposure, rather than blacklight, UVA tubes.I'm sure plenty of people notified the author (I don't have an instructables account, otherwise I would have done it myself) but they didn't rectify it.Quote from: Benta on October 02, 2020, 11:04:53 pmYou'll get that where ever you decide to share your project. The upside is you might get some suggestions about how it can be improved, even if they're often dished out without any tact or diplomacy.It's always important to be thick skinned when posting a project online because it will be picked apart to some degree. There's no safe space to share your project. If you're easilly offended, keep it to yourself.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2020, 10:15:36 am
content: Seems like the appropriate place to me. Says so right on the index page.https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/Quote

author: mark03
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2020, 05:05:45 pm
content: Best answer may be your own static site, "advertised" in a forum like eevblog, although I have run into plenty of links to dead personal sites where the owner's projects died with themDon't overlook github (or gitlab, or ...) as a place to host the design files and documentation. It's not only for code. Git does have a pretty steep learning curve, but you will thank yourself later for maintaining your designs in a proper source-control repository like git, and for using a sane format like Markdown for writing your documentation. And, once you are doing that, you may as well push it up to github for backup and sharing. If github turns evil at some point, you can easily push your local repo to the git-hosting site du jour, so you're not tied to one web site.Whatever you do, don't rely on outfits like hackaday or instructables to host your project. They not only make it *more* difficult for others to access it; when they eventually go belly-up so will your precious documentation.

author: hendorog
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2020, 05:49:33 pm
content: Github have webpages for projects, it's called github pages.Not used it myself, but probably worth checking out.Github might go away but git itself won't. It makes moving the entire project to another host is very simple