MOD PLEASE MOVE ME TO THE HOW-TO SOMEWHERE.
Application: Anything you want to share.
Symptoms: Your fishing for attention and you haven't gotten any for a while. Your ego needs some stroking, or your just a really nice guy/gal wanting to give and teach the world.
Honda Mechanic says: " I hate when people tell me how to do my job so leave me out of it!"
Choices:
The only skills you need is to read and write, and try to spell most of what you type so people understand at least what your trying to say.
Tools Needed:
PART I. DO THE INSTALL
This has been
Application: Anything you want to share.
Symptoms: Your fishing for attention and you haven't gotten any for a while. Your ego needs some stroking, or your just a really nice guy/gal wanting to give and teach the world.
Honda Mechanic says: " I hate when people tell me how to do my job so leave me out of it!"
Choices:
- Keep the infinite amount of knowledge locked up in your noggin and die a lonely soul.
- Share your wisdom with the world and maybe, just maybe someone will worship you as tuner king of CC.com!...or maybe not, or at least until my reign of ruler of CC is over
The only skills you need is to read and write, and try to spell most of what you type so people understand at least what your trying to say.
Tools Needed:
- Computer with internet access
- Fireworks, Photo shop, or some kind of image/photo editing software.
PART I. DO THE INSTALL
- Well it would just be silly if you did a writeup on something you have no idea about or no experience with, so the next time you do what ever you want to do the write up about, make sure to take lots of pictures when you do it.
- When your done, get the pictures back to the computer and edit them, filter them label them and last shrink them down a bit. I get mine down to about 300px across and lock the ratio of whatever the height some out to be. A 1200x1200 pic is not appropriate since the forum will resize them anyway and takes too bloody long to load for some one to see, especially if you got a boat load of images.
- Upload them to an image hosting site that will handle the bandwidth of a lot of users accessing them at one time. I like ImageShack but close seconds go to Flickr,Microsoft Spaces, and recently Google Photos (Most of these require you to create an account, but all are free)
When you upload them, make sure to write down the addresses of where the photos go on the web, or what I do is open up a text editor and paste the addresses in so I can reference to them later when I want to stick the photos in the write-up.
(Image Shack will list the addresses of the different formats you can use, I cut and paste the last one labeled "Direct link to image". Make sure to click on the "IMG" button in the format tools of the form editor so it shows up)
If you use one of the other hosting sites, just simply right click on the image in the site after it gets uploaded and click "Properties" and it should show you the link. It may not fit in the entire field to make sure to select the address from the beginning and go down so it scrolls and selects at the same time, then just copy and paste it to your text file.
- Since this writeup make take some time, and you probably won't get it done in one sitting, make sure you have a text editor open such as Wordpad or NotePad so you can copy and paste your work on your computer and paste a working copy in the forum when you want to work on it.
This way you save a draft copy on your computer without having a junky how-to on the forum for everyone to shred, even though your not done. - You'll notice these bracket type notations [] with letters inside. If you haven't seen these before, these are know as BB code formats. These tell the forum to BOLD, italics, or underline. You'll probably need to get familiar with this if you want your document to look formatted and a bit clean. Here some info: BBcode
- To see what you have before you officially "Submit" it, in this forum there is a "Preview" button which will give you a sneak peak on how your doing, or show any formating mistakes that you may have made.
- If you've accidentally submitted it, it's ok, just make sure to post another post in there to tell people that your still working on it, or make sure you have "DRAFT" somewhere in the original post.
- Notice the best writeup usually takes more time to type up then the time it took for you to do the install on whatever your writing the how-to about. It takes writing a draft more then a couple of revisions and then there are the photos and editing of photos if you really want it look sharp.
- Write down step by step how you did the installation of your how to.
- Don't leave out anything. You can always go back and trim back, but for now you want to write as much as possible. One of the problems is people don't detail what they did in a step. For example, .."unscrew that bolt and replace with new one..." isn't enough to get the info across to most people. Explain the detail of the bolt, where is it next to or around, what exact tool did you use and better yet, what tool you could substitute if your missing it.
- Remember who your target audience is. Most of which are not honda mechanics and are just hobby tuners learning along the way so explain as much as possible.
- Try to put a photo in between each step as you go. You should almost be able to do the how-to without any instruction, but with pics alone. The written steps should almost be a supplement. When someone is browsing for instructions, the one that they will use is the one with the most pics. It gets really hard to describe some parts so pics help a lot.
- If you have an image editor, try to label the parts in the pictures. If you don't have pictures, scan in some scribble drawings, (hey at least it's something).
- I can't stress enough how important some type of image or photo is important to making a writeup these days.
- Go back and review what you wrote, make corrections, spelling, wording etc. Make sure the pics you used represent what the step is. If need be go back and take more pictures.
- Go back and review what you wrote, make corrections, spelling, wording etc. Make sure the pics you used represent what the step is. If need be go back and take more pictures.
- Go back and review what you wrote, make corrections, spelling, wording etc. Make sure the pics you used represent what the step is. If need be go back and take more pictures.
- Alright, your ready for publishing.
- Once you're pretty comfortable of your work, publish it, BUT make sure you put at the top of you how-to that this is a draft
- The nice people on the forum will give you feedback on what you wrote, be prepared to get some flack, and make further adjustments to what you wrote.
- Make sure that you post references of other how-tos you may have found when you did your install. It's just courtesy to give credit when due, and it also gives your audience more resources to work from.
- Make sure that your how to has a flow to it, and is consistent with any other how tos that you write up in the future or past. Consistency is key.
- It's your how-to, put some style in it, make it yours.
This has been