MisterBunny.RepRap.org - RepRap as a blogging engine

I've appended part of an email conversation between me and Mister Bunny, on the super secret mailing list where the elder gods of RepRap hang out drinking their ambrosia and planning to take over the world and make it better.

This interchange neatly illustrates why we need to build in blogging into RepRap.org, so that folk like Mr. Bunny can do up their work and projects and then write them up in a narrative, blog-like fashion on MisterBunny.RepRap.org .

Narrative is a very natural and freeform method of communication, written into our hominid dna. Thus, blogging.

Here's an example of a website that allows a creator to show off their work, chat about it, and bask in the respect of their peers:
[vanheist.deviantart.com]

Here's vanheist's homepage:
[vanheist.deviantart.com]

This is the sort of user interaction we need for postmediawiki RepRap.org

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Sebastien Bailard:

People also have a tendency to do cool things up on blog.reprap.org, often with a simul-link to their personal blog, and not simultaneously "cut and paste" and write it up on the wiki. Every single [Explitive Deleted] time, almost. Grrrr...

Exhibit A: Forrest's plastic recycler
Exhibit B: Vik's metal casting
Exhibit C: Nop Head's PMMA result

If it's good enough to write up, it's good enough for the wiki. And I shouldn't be the one to do the cut and paste.

Aside from nagging you guys, this suggests I need to think about building bloglike features in the RepRap.org. Again, it's better to just do it than to talk about it.

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Mr. Bunny:

It will take more than nagging for me to copy large chunks of my blog into the wiki.

I fundamentally dislike ever having more than one copy of any piece of information, so I think multiple links to a single article are much better.

Blog articles have a chronological aspect to them. They go out of date, but that is fine in a blog. If it was in the wiki it would need to be maintained and updated whenever something new was discovered. That would end up a lot of work. I think my efforts are better spent doing experiments rather than maintaining documentation. I put a lot of extruder tips in the wiki, but now that is almost completely irrelevant since the move to stepper driven pinch wheel extruders.

As I think I have said before, I always access the web, including the reprap wiki, via a Google search, so it doesn't matter where the information is hosted as long as it ends up near the top of Google's results. If you google "reprap PMMA" or "reprap metal casting" you get Nop Head and Vik's articles much easier than digging through a wiki. The wiki could simply have links to these articles.

I don't get any revenue if people read it on the wiki. I don't mind giving away free information, but it is nice to get something back that doesn't add any cost for people using the information.

strange unlike Mr Bunny ~ I from all the comments on the Reprap forum three years ago regarding forum post on non RepRapable parts I did not post much on the forum.

I was added to the RepRap builders list but due to a family bereavement.

I missed the reply by window on the RepRap builders acceptance email.

I followed the instruction to contact the person who would fix this ~ had no reply. I eventually I gave up after several emails with no responce.

So I did my own blog particularly as I deviated significantly from RepRap.

Due to not being able find RP parts I had to create my own.

Nophead was my inspiration to blog my activities.

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Bodge It [reprap.org]
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BIQ Sanguinololu SD LCD board	BIQ Stepcon	BIQ Opto Endstop
BIQ Heater Block PCB	BIQ Extruder Peek clamp replacement	BIQ Huxley Seedling
BIQ Sanguinololu mounting	BIQ standalone Sanguinololu or Ramps mounting	Print It Stick It Cut it

My rep strap: [repstrapbertha.blogspot.com]

Buy the bits from B&Q pipestrap [diyrepstrap.blogspot.com]
How to Build a Darwin without any Rep Rap Parts [repstrapdarwin.blogspot.com]
Web Site [www.takeaway3dtech.com]

Well, we're damn happy to have you around, Blodge_It.

I want to make RepRap.org maximally welcoming and make space for people in the RepRap community as much as I can. It is my work, and my responsibility, and my joy.

I think a good way to do that is to provide individual user blog/showcases, like
misterbunny.reprap.org

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Making sure that parts, arts, projects and docs get into the RepRap library-commons-gallery-community-thingy is my other responsibility. It's the responsibility of all of us, really.

I think adding blogging-homepages is an easy fun way to do that.

And ma

Sebastien take a look at this post:
http://dev.forums.reprap.org/read.php?58,34871

Can it be an idea? Or It's too simple?

I'd like to know your opinion.

Thanks, Luca

Yes, it's easy to google "RepRap Metal casting" and get back the result you're looking for - as long as you know you're looking for Vik's results reprapping with metal. I, for one, have found that not having an up-to-date centralized source of documentation, such as the wiki, makes it excruciatingly difficult for newcomers like me to enter the project from a cold start. That's because I don't know that anybody named Nophead has extruded PMMA, blogged about it, and posted their results, so I don't know to Google for that.


It hit when I was building my Darwin, but some of the parts didn't match the wiki instructions - new versions of them had been posted, but only documented on a blog, not in the main wiki (not to pick on you Nophead - I love your blog! But I had no indication that the information I needed would be there.). These parts were designed for an interference fit, so the hole was meant to be slightly too small. Unfortunately, the only indication that these holes were meant to be too small was on a blog somewhere, not in the Darwin build instructions. All of the holes in all of my printed parts were slightly too small, so I'd drilled them out to clean them up. Not knowing that I wasn't supposed to drill these ones, they were drilled out like the rest of them - nearly making the parts useless, save for a handy innovation by my prof.

(The result of that is here: [objects.reprap.org] )

(And I'm not entirely satisfied with its location even now, as it is not linked to from here [objects.reprap.org] so it will be terribly hard to find.)

Fundamentally, it's not practical to develop an open-source project without effective documentation - and a patchwork of blogs is not effective documentation. We need to be good about keeping an up-to-date wiki, or else the entry barrier will just become too huge.

Where did you pick up the STL file for the modified bracket? Has it made it into an official release, in which case I agree the documentation should have been updated but it is not easy to do. There are lots of pictures of the Darwin in various stages of construction so perhaps many would have to be re made. Not easy after the event.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Not sure, since Wade printed the parts for us. But I assume he was working from the official version release.

The pictures don't all need to be updated, just some mention somewhere or a link to your blog post or something.

Presumably the SVN version of the STL files was updated - after all, how else could a change have been made?

That being the case, the instructions for using that particular part should have been changed.

Perhaps each part in SVN should have a "instructions for this part" with it in SVN? It would then be blindingly obvious that when you change the STL, you should update the instructions with it, and add a "reason for change" to the end of the .txt file?

Not perhaps ideal, and in some ways a wiki is the proper way to manage change tracking for documentation, where SVN is change tracking for code. So maybe it should go the other way, with the STL's in the wiki instead of in SVN?

Sigh. Not a simple problem. Perhaps we should simply acknowledge that it is incumbent upon those who update SVN to update the documentation on the wiki. In that case, we should be able to look at SVN, determine who is to blame, and let them know that they owe jbayless an apology.

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I'm building it with Baling Wire

I think what happened is that I blogged it and made the improved design available but it never made it into an official release so, quite rightly, the build instructions were not updated.

I think Wade just used my design to save printing time but didn't tip off Jacob the parts were different from the originals.

I should have added a link to the mod, but not much point now as I don't think any more Darwins will be printed. At the time I assumed that improvements would get incorporated into the design but it got abandoned for Mendel.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Oh well, it's all good. I've received so much help for free from you guys, and especially from Wade, that nobody owes me an apology; and besides, the problem is fixed now (at least for me). I'm just concerned that future updates, for example to Mendel, might take place in a similarly somewhat-haphazard way.