Computers.Howto-Rascal.com – Computer HowTo's You Can Actually Use

[Eric Ward - URLwire]

Announce Date: March 9, 2012
Computers.Howto-Rascal.com – Computer HowTo's You Can Actually Use
URL: http://computers.howto-rascal.com

The concept for computers.howto-rascal.com came about through total
frustration. Howto documents are an excellent resource to drill down
and reach a specific goal quickly, if they are done correctly. If done
badly, they are at best, a time burglar and the misguided changes can
be difficult to roll back possibly leaving your system crippled.

Those seeking tutorial type documents to reach a computer based goal
know the information available is unorganized, scattered and often
just plain wrong. I know this because I have wasted countless hours
looking for those very documents. If I found what I needed, or close,
a lot of the time I would get a ways through the instructions to find
they led me down the wrong path.

So, what makes me think I can do this so much better? I don’t,
actually. One of the cool features of computers.howto-rascal.com is
its open design philosophy. The people poised to make this site the
absolute best place to create and publish howto documents are the
contributors themselves. The site is currently functional and
intuitive but the tools need refinement.

All contributors are encouraged to submit their ideas on how to make
the site better and more productive. The ideas are scrutinized,
filtered for practicality, then presented back to the community to
vote on whether the change would be beneficial or not. If accepted, a
professional crew of web developers makes the actual changes
preserving the clean feel and functionality of the site.

Another very important feature is the peer review system. Once a howto
is published, the end user can rate the document and leave written
feedback (no account required). This allows the contributor to refine
and improve the information. The lack of this feature is one of the
main reasons the current howto sites don’t work for my purposes. The
other is they try to be way too general in order to attract as much
traffic as possible.

Computers.howto-rascal.com on the other hand allows the howto document
to be very specialized, through header fields, yielding better results
on major search engines. The hope is, that upon finding a howto on the
site, the brand will instill confidence that it is useable and of
excellent quality.

Stay tuned! Another howto-rascal.com site is coming soon.

Posted by Eric Ward on 3/09/12
Archived URLwire page: http://www.urlwire.com/news/030912.html