Blogging on farmOS.org

Arising out of today’s “It’s My farmOS” Zoom conference, this is to initiate further discussion on the idea of users adding stories (workflows, tutorials, etc.) in the form of blog posts to a new section of the website that is to be developed for that purpose.

The idea is that this should be “lightly curated” content, in a sort of middle ground between the canonical documentation, which must be heavily vetted, and the essentially uncurated content found in this Discourse forum… Which content content could be cross-linked between blog and Discourse (i.e. using Discourse for comments on the blog posts).

The ideal workflow for content (if a bit too technical for some users) would be via pull requests to the Github repository of farmOS.org, which process (given benefit of some HowGo guidance that Mike kindly provided) i am attempting to worth through, but meanwhile perhaps we can have some discussion on this topic, to smooth the way for lots of user-generated content to develop.

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Thanks for getting the ball rolling Walt! And I can’t wait to see how your first post turns out!

Regarding curation, I mentioned this in Zoom, but here again is the page for Gatsby Blog Contributions, which I think provides a great example of a submission process and a set of guidelines to follow. There are plenty more lessons I think we can learn from gatsbyjs.org, like the section on Docs Templates (another topic we discussed briefly today) and the general way they break up their content into docs, tutorials, recipes, reference guides and blog posts.

I’m trying to recall, but I believe we identified two categories of blog posts we wanted to encourage to start with, which we could use as tags… :thinking: Does anyone remember what those were? I think one was “tutorial”, but what was the other?

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Announcements!

Btw, this is so annoying:

@mstenta, let’s disable this.

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Fixed!

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Hey @jgaehring: Thanks for the (re)pointer to that page on Gatsby site, which is exactly the sort of thing that’s needed here, IMHO; in fact we might do well to lift it essentially as-is. If you can spell out out as explicitly as possible the kind of contributions you’d like to host, and also the kind you’re not interested to host, that the best thing you can do to get the good stuff flowing, while filtering out all the rest.

To that end: would be good to hear (as a would-be contributor/ don’t-wannabe-editor) a bit more than just the two words “Tutorials” and “Announcements,” by way of editorial guidance. In fact that FirstPost i undertook to write -here’s a complete first draft i’ve nailed up on my project wiki for review[1]- does not fit into either of these two categories very well, does it? Perhaps a 3rd category of “User Stories” might be added to accommodate such things? Or perhaps this is not what’s wanted at all -in which case, no problem, feel free to ignore :slight_smile:

[1] Reason i put that draft up on wiki is: i’m still a bit confused about how this Github pull request process works; in fact from the link in your comment above, i can’t even find the actual content of my pull request! So i just submitted this latest draft again -as a comment on the previous one, apparently. This technical stuff is kinda-meta, i realize, but for those that are interested (i am, anyway), i think it is doubly-cool that that Gatsby page you linked above has a DocBook (or GitBook? whatever) in the sidebar where one can easily pull up docs on all the technical nitty-gritty, besides those editorial guidelines.

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Agreed. Ideally we would fold this into the Content Guidelines, providing specific guidelines for each category, and then require that submissions are tagged with at least one category. So something like this:

Content Guidelines

All blog submissions must be tagged with at least one content category. Guidelines for each category are listed below.

Tutorial

  • Some
  • guidelines
  • here

Announcement

  • Some
  • guidelines
  • here

etc…

I like that idea. I suppose, alternatively, we could make the “Tutorials” category applicable to a broader swath of content, to include “user stories” as well. I’m not sure what is best. Thinking more about it now, though, I wonder if we might require tutorials to answer the following upon submission:

  • What question does your tutorial answer, or what problem does it solve?

Reading your updated submission now, I guess that’s what I would most like to have clarified. To address the concern someone raised in Zoom, we want to make sure the blog is not just adding more fragmentation to the farmOS community, which already has this forum, Riot, GitHub, the User Guide, etc. Namely, I think this blog can serve as a repository of material that is less open-ended and conversational than the forum or Riot, more niche and context-sensitive than the User Guide, and generally more conclusive and authoritative while still not requiring continued maintenance.

So yea, with that all considered, when I read “Conclusions: Inconclusive” in your post, that does make me wonder if it might be better suited to the forum. At least for now. But I think there is definitely the kernel of a good blog post in there, which would potentially answer: “How to use sensors and observations in conjunction to monitor farm conditions more effectively.” Perhaps even then it might make sense to categorize it as a “User Story”, because we don’t expect that it will be the one and only definitive solution to that problem, but that it will at least posit a few examples of ways you’ve personally managed to solve that problem within your specific context.

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