FirstRib Documentation and Downloads

Whilst this blog-centred website has been usefully used by myself for some years, I haven't really spent a lot of time on producing new content for it over that time. A general rule regarding the validity in terms of usefulness of any website is the amount of activity taking place on it, which in the case of say a blog site tends to be proportional to the frequency of posts (assuming that posting ‘news’ is what the blog is for, which is not actually the main reason for the existence of this one).

Nevertheless, now that FirstRib is hitting the road, and despite it proving easy to add technical documentation blogs here, I am planning to move to a more integrated online presence approach soon, whose intended purpose is not to invite the increased activity of others, but simply to allow me to more easily organise my project work in a sustainable, searchable, integrated manner, and without the type of “information time-consuming overload” chaotic bloat most any discussion forum inevitably creates over time.

My plan is to include documentation with close ties to my own development needs, and with a view to easily provide downloads of any resulting deliverables I feel like publishing, whilst being able to easily ignore or accept any feedback or bug reports or requests, depending on what I find best suits my own development process and personal needs.

Whilst the likes of github, gitlab, and similar are excellent for keeping track of code development, issues, and new ideas being pushed, their user interface is less than appealing to most of us compared with a nicely produced website or blog or even a phpBB-type “discussion forum”.

Nevertheless, a discussion forum is far from an ideal place to document a project's development since its random post nature tends, no matter the logical care and consistency given to its structure, to result in a mess in terms of the desired logical organisation of documentation, feedback, and other forms of contribution. Even worse, I have found, is that a discussion forum tends to encourage an incompatible mix of useful and useless feedback and comments, and depending on how its administrators structure it, can allow individual projects to be virtually hidden in terms of exposure to those who might be interested in them. Overall, the end result is that such forums, whilst being somewhat addictive from a social media perspective, tend to result in huge data bloat and a vast waste of time that could be better spent elsewhere from a project's development perspective.

Tiny Linux Blog: https://www.tinylinux.info/