Disappointed - My opinion

Hehe I like the coloured hand-sketches : )

Hi Kas,

That's sounds very useful. Maybe called Documentation and Productivity Tips? or something like that perhaps?

The worst would be where we no longer have a blank canvas for a blog post, and end up with templates :

Yes! The blogger should have as much creative freedom as possible. There are many posters that make good-to-read articles and beautiful posts in their very own style. I love it.

Content Creators Rule.

shabaz,

Thank you for the information I wonder if a new group would be helpful. The group could be for tips and pointers for things like this. I remember a while ago one roadtest had a lot of good info about taking pictures of displays. The issue is all this great and useful information (taking pictures, linking sections, etc.) are scattered around the site. If someone wants to find it, it can be very hard. If there was a group where such information could collated for easy finding and referencing it might help not only those new to blogging but even some of us who have been doing it for a long while.

Kas

found it..

How to Write Your Design Challenge Blog Posts

Hi Kas,

Ah, I know that one, because I did it recently : )

Basically, once you've written your blog post, and any section titles have been marked as such using the Editor tools (i.e. marked as Heading 1 or Heading 2 etc) then click on the first line of your blog post, and go to Editor tools and select from the tools the ">>" button (for "more tools") and then select Table of Contents. A symbol appears in the blog post. When you save the blog post, the symbol is replaced by a table of contents with hyperlinks!

Hey shabaz,

I would really like to know how to better use hyper links within posts to jump between sections. If you can dig that post up it would be greatly appreciated.

Kas

I personally think its the authors and our responsibility as you say, to step in and suggest to authors from time to time where needed.

The worst would be where we no longer have a blank canvas for a blog post, and end up with templates : (

I prefer it when individuals have creativity and their own uniqueness on their blog posts, but perhaps some training or link to hints could help, to suggest to authors on what they can do. I recall Spanner Spencer wrote an awesome blog post on how to write blog posts : )

I still recall bits of it, since it was quite interesting and informative.

I'll try to dig it up..

Yes, shabaz. Its sometimes difficult to see a design contest post in its context. Maybe e14 could help with making a contest series of blogs more consistent. Or versed bloggers could step in to help contestants to put a line in the story?

I feel that people tend to over-promise when they haven't done enough research on what they plan on doing. Some might try to propose a project that requires that they learn something new (which is good, because you're more likely to go through and learn it since you've made a commitment), but if the learning curve is too steep, they tend to abandon the project entirely.

The same seems to be happening for road tests occasionally: you tend to see some one/two paragraph reviews where the applicant simply states that 'the board was difficult to work with because of the lack of documentation', which if I recall correctly seems to be happening a lot with MCU dev boards, since people who have worked with Arduinos tends to try to jump in and try complicated ARM boards.

I'm guessing that they did have very good project proposals considering that e14 selected them, and the proposal format usually requires that an applicant includes data on their experience, skills & commitment.

One possible solution would be that besides simply including the 'idea' (i.e. what you want to build), e14 makes it compulsory to include:

• details like how an applicant plans on doing it: to check how well the applicant has researched the finer details of implementation (eg: number of ADCs/SPIs available for sensors on a particular MCU).
• for roadtests: has the applicant looked at the documentation of the product or tried out the software in demo mode?
• how familiar he/she is with the parts: a person who's only used an Arduino will probably not be able to build a complex FPGA project.
• what are the expected difficulties/why the project might not work - this will tell the reviewer whether the applicant understands the complexities of the project & understands how easy it will be to implement in practice (eg complex control systems  which require a lot of tuning).