CitizenKate's Blog

Please don't ever feature one of mine if I ever write something relevant. I prefer to be unobtrusive, not call any attention to myself.

I almost feel like this is an admonishment for my loosely connected to leatherwork blog posts. I will try to keep all of these excellent guidelines in mind for any blog posts I might make in the future. Thanks for posting them. Another LW member and I just had a discussion about what to put here and you have answered.

I was worried that someone who has already posted might take this as a "correction", but that's not the intent at all. So far, everything that has been posted is acceptable, and if you prefer to stay more "under the radar", that's perfectly okay. What I hoped to do here is to stimulate some ideas for new content, as there are many more possibilities to explore.

Lots of good ideas for blog articles here Kate. I'm looking forward to when this section catches on and more people start using it. Can I ask why the blog section would be where you would prefer step by step tutorials? I think that if I wanted to find out how to do something I'd first look in the section of the forum that dealt with that particular subject, or in the "how do I do that" section. Seems like it would be a lot easier to find a tutorial in a place like that than having to search through dozens (or hundreds) of blogs.

Hi Clay - We think a blog post is a better venue for publishing tutorials because it offers more features for formatting and presenting the content, and fewer restrictions on article size and the number of photos that can be posted.

Another advantage is, this makes it easier for the author to keep the narrative together as he/she continues to add to the original post, while all the comments and responses are kept at the end of the post. (I'm sure you've seen the tutorials that were posted in pieces, with comments interspersed throughout the topic.) This way, someone coming along later to read the article can see the complete article in one continuous block.

As for being able to find the tutorials we're looking for, that's a very good question. We now have tutorials being posted in all areas of the site - the forum, the gallery (in PDF or video formats), the blog section, even the ones that were in pages in the "front" section of our site... That alone makes them a challenge to organize. We decided the best solution was to create a Tutorial Index page in the new "front" section to make it easier to locate a tutorial by topic, author, or by keyword, and provides links to wherever it resides on the site. That is a work in progress, but you can see what it looks like by going to the "Home" of LW, then navigating to the Tutorial page.

KATE

Yep, everything Kate said!

and don't forget, if you have a blog somewhere else, link to it from here. It's easy. Your blog will get more traffic, and our visitors will enjoy the variety. Please keep the links family-friendly, folks. We reserve the right to remove anything we determine violates our terms-of-service agreement, or anything else in the best interests of our members.

Johanna

Thanks for the response Kate. I guess that makes sense as far as organization goes. When I started my own blog a while ago, I felt it was a place for less formal, more personal type articles that would be read more by family and close friends, not a place to do more serious type teaching articles. I always figured the individual sections of the forum were a more appropriate place for those. Guess I'll have to re-think that.

What you have done with your own blog is great, and please let me clarify that we certainly do not presume to suggest what you should write there! Different blogs have different purposes, and even here, there is a pretty wide range of content that is acceptable, from more formal, informative material, to more a more personal side of things. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about when I refer to "human interest". I think both the forum and the blogs allow some flexibility for members to post whatever they have to contribute.

One of the reasons we added this feature to the site was to provide a better publishing medium for instruction. However, we are planning to continue allowing people to post tutorials in the forum, if they want to. We already have a large number of them there that will be indexed in our database (in other words, we're not planning on moving them), so if you prefer to post a tutorial in the forum, we'd rather have it there, than not at all. Although we have expressed a preference, we don't feel that strongly about it one way or another, and don't plan to make any "rules" along those lines. So no worries, it's all good.