Most of you will be aware that the FAQ has been hosted for the last four years by Grunff, one of our contributors, of Clare Associates
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on their servers.
Grunff has now moved on and set up a his own web solutions company called SymWorks at
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and very kindly offered to continue hosting the FAQ website on their new servers.
I would like to thank Clare Associates very much, on behalf of uk.d-i-y members, for their valuable support to date, and wish Grunff every success with his SymWorks venture.
As a result of this there is a new sponsor's logo on the FAQ site.
Maybe I should ask a question of the group. I have wondered about putting somewhere a set of not really formal faqs but pieces that are useful for when we have no formal faq, and I wondered what people woudl think of the idea, and how it might or might not tie into what we already have. My central thought was that if the usual work involved in producing our FAQs were sidestepped it would be practical to put a lot of good info up on a lot of subject areas easily and quickly.
I was thinking this would be a mix of: individual pieces by people happy to have their work used links to threads on google groups that have addressed a particulr subject quite comprehensively and links to sites that cover a specific topic especially well, such as the paving expert site.
There are already many subjects I've got info on, a few examples being several threads addressing various aspects of part p an unfinished cleaning faq plus a fair bit more cleaning info old wiring: dating it, the risks, what to do, what to avoid doing
in fact there are way too many to list, there are also several small bits of info that really help sort common problems out.
Would there be a problem in doing something like this? How would it relate, if at all, to the group and the existing faq? I dont think it could not be a secondary formal ukdiy faq, as this would introduce too much work with rewriting. So it might be an independant site not connected with ukdiy other than linking to ukdiy articles already on the web. What way do you think it should go?
I have often wondered about the possibility of some kind of multi-contributor complimentary 'faq', which sits along side (but separate from) the primary faq.
One idea we discussed a while back was to use a content management system which allows multiple users to each have an account, and contribute pages/sections.
I would be quite happy to host this, or any other form of additional information resource. I'd be interested to hear what people think.
Sounds like you are describing a wiki. And yes, I think that would be a Good Thing.
It would allow contribututions as you describe.
( And also the associated vandalism and spurious postings. There are criticisms often aimed at wikis, at for example wikipedia. Along with banal ' Humph. I never consider a wikipedia a valid reference' complainers. ( What do they expect: a reference traceable back to the tablets of stone on Mount Sainai? The articles usually provide citations if required. ) However, I have found that in general wikipedia is very reliable and authoritative in several obscure topics! The signal does tend to outweigh the noise by a substantial margin. In general, it works.
Just need someone to host it.... Anyone know of a web hosting outfit around here? :-)
Only problem with public wikis is the amount of spam you'll get posted to them, and very quickly. They take a lot of effort to maintain. I would be more in favour of a user account only setup, with no restrictions on who can have an account (as long as they are a real person, not a spam bot).
:-)
As I said, happy to host anything the group comes up with. One thing were not short of is server capacity.
And better, if you can be arsed you can see what other people have said and how the article has evolved and been argued over. Something you don't get in many other works of referrence.
Or if anyone wants to make a collection f their own favourite subject, one could open a Google group of their own and simply email the posts to themselves for inclusion is such a group. After a month or so Google close a thread or such parts of it that have hit that cut off.
But they will allow the format to be used in sending an e-mailed reply. That way no spam would be posted as those groups are moderated by their owners. They are not Google Usenet groups, just publicly available sites run along the same or similar lines.
What I envisaged was a wiki-style content management system, with a user account for whoever wants to contribute. I'm quite happy to set it up and host it, and create the user accounts.
This way, say you had some content you wanted to add, maybe one page about a particular type of woodworking tool, you'd simply log in, create your page, put your content in, save, and go. No need for any one person to contribute any more than they want to.
This page that you create can be anything from a single paragraph saying "I bough a PEX400 the other day, used it on a piece of oak, it was great" to a very long and detailed review/comparison of a set of tools. Or it could just be some links to articles elsewhere.
My main reasons for suggesting a content management system, rather than a bunch of html pages are:
It means that you don't need to know anything beyond basic word processing to use it.
It will auto-generate a self consistent navigation structure for the site, which is very important for sites with lots of content.
- seems to work quite well, although I've no idea how much work Paul does in the background to keep it that way. A login is required before you can edit anything and I guess that keeps the spammers out to some extent.
Yup, I am in favour of that... it would also solve another problem - that of having a quick and easy way of hosting drawings and pictures without needing either have your own web space or to link to photo base sites.
That sounds much better than what I had in mind, as all ukdiyers can contribute directly, instead of it being a site operated by one person, with all pages being posted by the one person. I didnt realise you were willing to do the work it would need.
I have one question about it though. If people can post anything, such as 'I tried X and its not bad', then it seems it may become more like uk.d-i-y than a sort-of-faq site. And if that occurred, it would be less useful as a sort-of-faq site.
With any type of site there is also the question of longevity. If the site owner's circumstances change and theyre no longer able to maintain it, which does happen, a lot of work and data could be lost. I dont have any real suggestions re that, only that its one of the issues I'm aware of with whatever system we use.
It would be my pleasure, provided enough people here thought it was a good idea and wanted to contribute articles.
Yes, I do see what you mean. I think it would be a good idea to have some loose-ish guidelines on what kind of articles are appropriate - anyone care to suggest some guidelines?
As you say, this is always an issue, and I'm afraid I don't have a simple answer. There are lots of possible solutions.
One of the most comprehensive is for another person to act as a backup, taking a regular copy of the data. This process could be fully automated, so that this person doesn't ever have to do anything, the site simply gets downloaded to their local machine, or to another server, every x days. I'd be happy to set something like this up if we go ahead with this and end up with some useful data on the site.
A great idea - as long as Dr Dribble (amongst a few others with strange ideas about windmills and solar panels) are banned otherwise you'll have endless edit wars.
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