this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy

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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:

  1. Don’t overthink it, just post the link and if people don’t want to click it they won’t
  2. 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)
  3. 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?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'd rather see the how-to live somewhere that is expected to last and where it may stay online for a while.

If the how-to is valuable to me, I'll make a copy of it in my documentation and also submit the page to the Wayback Machine just in case it is taken down, the host ceases to exist, etc.

I prefer my how-tos to be Markdown-based, they're easy to edit and the text will reflow well on small screens unlike a PDF.