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Where Can You Post Your Technical Experiences?
Dishwasha asks: "For the past several months I have spent an inordinate amount of time wrestling with video conferencing. The compatibility issues between different video conferencing equipment and network hardware are enough to make a seasoned network administrator pull their hair out. When it comes down to it, there's not a lot of good documentation on how to actually implement video conferencing. I'd like to help other people save time by sharing my experiences, but I don't have the time or resources to maintain what would ultimately be just a few unorganized web pages. Has anybody set up a website and/or forum for submitting general HOWTO's? I'd envision something similar to Linuxdoc but categorized by technology and moderated."
Since you're looking for a more or less generalized database of human knowledge. Even a categorized database of computer knowledge would be extremely broad and informative.
The modest solution with modern-day technology is still quite basic:
1) Create an HTML page describing your experience.
2) Use keywords and clear title so that people will find you.
3) Submit to Google.
4) Submit to some sites that cover the topics specific to your case. Most of the online publications will gladly accept free content, if it matches their topic.
Send a bunch of query letters to publications, online and off. There's definitely a market for articles like this.
Alex.
I for one would be very interested in this info.
I recently got a webcam, and I'm having a hell of a time getting decent videoconferencing through anything at all.
Yahoo Messenger works but not in super webcam mode, giving a wonderful 1.5 FPS. MSN Messenger works but not with audio. Etc...
I'm on ADSL going through a router using NAT and a firewall.
Or just use your Slashdot Journal and let Slashdot Slashdot itself.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I would recommend that you ues UseNet for this. Write up your how-to or knowledgebase document so that it CLEARLY explains the problem and the appropriate steps to resolve it. For an example format get a knowledgebase article from Microsoft or Novell. Then post it to the appropriate newsgroup, making sure to use a clear simple title that acurately describes the issue (think about the keywords you searched for when you first encounterd the problem). Google takes care of the rest for you by archiving the message for posterity. Then, whenever you or anyone else needs that information again, it is a simple matter of searching Google Groups for your post.
Compile it into an easy-to-read website with minimal reliance on anything more than JPG and HTML.
Find a moderate web host that can scale when you need it
Submit this page with a fully relevant meta/title tag to the leading search engines.
Sit back and watch sites mirror yours and the content appears zipped up on the P2Ps. Branched/Appended version will flower everywhere.
Congratulations! You've just provided valuable content to the world without imposing any new barriers of entry.
mug
I recommend posting (via Google or whatever means you find appropriate) a detailed and well-written summary of the problem and your solution, with keywords.
- - -
I did this over a year ago after banging my head against a wall for weeks getting my Gateway FDP1500 LCD monitor to work with my GeForce MX DVI card under Linux.
I stumbled across a solution that someone had posted to a mailing list, but the site had been taken offline, so the only copy available was from Google's cache. Luckily, I saved a local version of the cached page, because a short time later the information no longer came up on google search at all.
Determined to keep this information out there for others to see (and because I knew I'd lose my copy sooner or later) I wrote a short how-to article with the necessary monitor specs and XF86-Config settings, then submitted it to comp.os.linux.setup via Google Groups.
Just this month, I discovered that Suse (like most other distributions, Knoppix being a notable exception) still doesn't configure X properly with this monitor, and my personal copy of the info was long gone. So I searched on Google Groups for "Gateway FPD1500", and up came my posting: "Gateway FPD1500 LCD Monitor -- how to make it work under Linux."
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The key here is to post your article in the appropriate newsgroup, and make your article stand out from the normal, casual conversation by making it highly informative, well-written and searchable (be descriptive and detailed in your subject line and body copy). This way, it's a genuine contribution to the appropriate newsgroup, rather than something that nobody but you will appreciate or be able to find.
How do you "submit to Google" [obvious double entendre/sexual innuendo notwithstanding]?
:)
Is there a form you can fill out...[snip]
At risk of responding to a troll (and getting modded Flamebait
If you go to the Google main page and click on "Services and Tools" (pretty logical so far) you'll find a link to a "Site Map".
And if you click on that you'll see a link to a submission form in the lower right-hand corner.
There, that wasn't so hard was it?
(In other news detailed instructions were given for nose-blowing and ass-wiping.)