How do you folks prefer to consume how-to’s and walkthroughs?
I’m starting to document how-to guides for people passionate about IT (who maybe are a little bit too into it) that like to run enterprise-grade systems at home.
Basically, I’m publicising my documentation for setting up systems and the weird problems I hit that may have taken me days or weeks to solve. Often this information isn’t able to be searched online or has little to no vendor documentation on how to solve it. Basically, I’m hoping my suffering means someone else might not have to if I share this stuff.
At this stage I’m putting everything into a blog, but I know how annoying it is to see posts on platforms like Lemmy that are a hyperlink and a bare post. So how would you prefer to see it?
I’ve considered a few options, each with negatives and positives but largely it distils to:
- Don’t overthink it, just post the link and if people don’t want to click it they won’t
- Duplicate the content of the blog post to the lemmy post (means double-handling the edits when the post has to be updated but preserves the info in the event the blog dies)
- Post the link and put a high level breakdown of the guide in the lemmy post, just enough that people get the main idea and they can follow the link for more details if they choose (more work as it means writing the post essentially twice, just more condensed)
What do you folks think?
I like #3.
If it’s something like a knowledge database a wiki would be better suited. You can organize stuff in a tree-like structure and people can edit stuff instead of having convoluting discussions inbetween your writings/comments.
You could just start here, write like 5-10 howtos and see if people like it. You’ll get to know if people like it and what exactly works and what doesn’t. You can then simply move the stuff to a wiki once you have enough content ready and it won’t look that empty. You can then edit your 10 posts and link to the wiki. This approach works without speculating.