I wrote a few how-to’s on topics that I thought information was somehow scarce around the tubes. Now that I’m thinking calmly, they were poorly written as a ton of documentation around. So I’m using this post to create a decent schema on those how-to’s.
Taking as basis the so-wonderful layouts of eHow, wikiHow, Wikipedia and Instructables, I decided to somehow retake their general ideas and use them in a similar way. Basically a nicely structured how-to should have a requirements list, a basic explanation and the thorough steps that need to be accomplished. Also, a good how-to should include links to everywhere else for further reading on a given topic and an in-depth explanation on what is to be done.
Source codes should be delegated to somewhere else. Reading some *particular* posts, I got to Pastebin and similar sites. I’d like something like that, so I’ll check it right away. Another thing I’ll be doing on these how-to’s is to provide a simple, quick answer to everything. Further reading should be separated, just like a kitchen recipe.
The reason on that, is quite simple. Some people are expecting a quick, dirty answer and that’s it. In-depth explanations are geek-only, and while the audience of this blog are mainly people like me, which will not be satisfied with a kitchen recipe, statistics show that the huge hits on how-to’s are mainly by people looking for a quick and cheap answer. Comments suggest the same.
I’m hitting the CHM to PDF conversion right away. From now on, I’ll try to write a how-to weekly. This week will be the beginning of Geek Press’ revival and it’ll be exactly with that how-to. I’m re-writing the previous how-to’s and I finally made up my mind. I’ll be archiving the previous generated content as I no longer find it useful.
I’ll make a number of changes around here. So I’ll be back. If you’re reading this and have any suggestion, feel free to comment. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated, along with requests on any topic you’d like to read about.
