There's a problem with the way tutorial writing works on this website. Specifically, if something doesn't get "manually" moved into the list on the Tutorials page, it's pretty much gone forever in very short order. The only place it's listed after that is in the author's "writeups" page and the occasional lucky search.

Because of the nature of tutorials, and the needs of people looking for them, it seems to me that there should be more default persistence for the things. It would certainly encourage tutorial writing more than discouraging it, whereas right now it seems the opposite is the case.

I'm willing to be wrong about this. Somebody tell me how the current setup encourages the aggregation of good tutorials rather than causing them to be lost almost immediately and discouraging people from submitting more of them. If there's a good answer to this, I might write some more tutorials, but having had 50% of my own tutorials simply disappear (despite initial, and immediate, positive feedback from the community at large), I'm less than enthusiastic to put the effort into it again in the foreseeable future.

I bring this up to foster discussion and prompt some good ideas, or to get someone to point out something I've overlooked. I hope some constructive feedback is the result.

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
 - apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: writing tutorials
by planetscape (Chancellor) on Oct 12, 2005 at 00:35 UTC

    After writing a Tutorial of my own and watching it slide off the radar, I unofficially "adopted" the Tutorials page and have done my best to update it and keep it current.

    At the end of July, I used Limbic~Region's excellent code, Keeping Tutorials Current, to locate unlinked Tutorials. I reviewed each link thus returned and submitted the additions to theorbtwo and castaway. to2 massaged the data a little and castaway did the actual edit. Since then, I have tried to pay close attention to new Tutorials so that they can be added promptly and the page should (hopefully) not be allowed to become so out-dated again.

    On September 29, I was granted the privilege of becoming a janitor, so now I am able to do the edits myself.

    All of this is a long way of saying: You are not the only one concerned about the Tutorials page. Others are working on the problem; a pmdevil solution would be ideal, but in the meantime, the janitorial side of things is doing it manually.

    So... If there are Tutorials that someMonk knows of that aren't linked but should be, please, /msg planetscape , and I'll take care of it. :-)

    Thanks!

    planetscape
[reply]

      Thanks. Nice to know what's currently being done.

      By the way, I sent you a message re: a tutorial, as requested.

      print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
      		 - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin

[reply]
Re: writing tutorials
by GrandFather (Saint) on Oct 11, 2005 at 22:43 UTC

    From the pmDevils ToDo wiki:

    Automate Tutorials Page Tutorials is currently hand-edited, and often misses some tutorials in its list. Idea is to automate, this involves: Make a setting containing a list of tutorial categories, add an actual tutorial table to the perltutorial nodetype, in which the category of each is noted. Default new tutorials to 'uncategorized'. Add also a field for parent/child tutorials so a hierarchy can be shown. Update the actual Tutorials section to list automatically all perltutorial type nodes. Change the 'move to Tutorials' for editors to just change the type of a node to 'perltutorial' and set it to the 'uncategorized' category.

    Is that what you didn't want to know :). No one's gotten arount to it yet.

    Perl is Huffman encoded by design.
[reply]

      Actually, that's an interesting mix of good and bad news. It means it is already on the list, which is good news, but also that it's not getting done with any alacrity, which is not so good, of course.

      I certainly understand that there's probably more work to be done than time we could expect a bunch of volunteers to spend on it, of course, but that's sorta beside the point I guess.

      Thanks for pointing that out to me.

      print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
      		 - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin

[reply]

      If we switch tutorials over to using similar infrastructure to the SDC stuff I think it will be lot easier to implement.

      Note to pmdevils: all this needs to be done right is a new type added to represent external links.

      ---
      $world=~s/war/peace/g

[reply]
Re: writing tutorials
by dbwiz (Curate) on Oct 12, 2005 at 06:17 UTC

    Tutorials have been neglected quite often in the Monastery.

    We have had calls for reading them (Overlooked Gems) and calls for action (Rethinking Tutorials), but in the end we still have the same regrettable situation where the nodes that should be the Monastery most valuable assets are disrespectfully left behind.

    A course of action was sort of announced but nothing has come out of it yet.

[reply]

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