We’ve been working on a few different features for the past couple of weeks, one of which is the new HowToDoThings discussion board. The discussion board will be a place that members and contributors can interact with each other. The editors will be available to respond to questions or comments posted in the discussion board, but it’s really a place for the HowToDoThings community to thrive.
We won’t edit or filter anything you say here (unless other users flag it as inappropriate). You can ask questions about specific articles or the site in general, comment on your likes and dislikes about the site and easily communicate with your HowToDoThings peers.
Let us know what you think!
If you’ve been reading the blog regularly, I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’re adding a few new categories here and there. One of our most recent additions (which will hopefully make a big difference to new contributors) is the HowToDoThings category within Computers & Internet > Internet. Until now most of our “help” articles have been somewhat hidden on a hard-to-find Technical Support page.
With the addition of this new category, you’ll know exactly where to go if you have questions about writing an article, managing your account or what the editorial process looks like. Of course, the editors are always available to answer questions too. But the most commonly asked questions are outlined here and in the site FAQ, so you shouldn’t have to look too far to figure out whatever it is that you need to know.
What do a hamster, LaDainian Tomlinson and a dazzling diva have in common? They were all at Top Pot Donuts on Halloween drinking coffee.
We were inspired by the festive mood of Halloween to create a “Holidays” category for at least the next few months, if not for good. So if you’re inclined to look, you’ll notice that you can now find all of our Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah articles in one place.
Don’t wait until the day after Thanksgiving to start decorating for Christmas, visit our new category and get a head start. String those Christmas lights and start thawing that turkey.
Boo!
Now that we have that out of the way, I wanted to let you know that, as we enter the holiday season, we’re going to be adding more “seasonal” article topics to the site. We want to make sure that everyone knows How To Cook a Turkey, How To Play Dreidel and How To String Christmas Lights. We may even be emailing certain contributors directly to request their services in writing more holiday articles.
We want to keep HowToDoThings in the “spirit” (get it…it’s Halloween) of the holidays!
This morning we’re at El Diablo coffee shop where Brian is preparing to add a bunch of suggested topics to the site and to eat the best ham and cheese breakfast sandwich in Seattle, or at least Queen Anne.
Amidst bites, Brian is dedicated to generating article ideas for our contributors. We realize that it can be hard to constantly come up with new topics to write about, so we try to help out when we can by suggesting topics that have a high search volume or that we just think might be fun to write.
Contributors are free to accept and write about the specific topics that we come up with, or just browse through their categories and use them for inspiration to come up with new (or related) ideas of their own.
We’re here today at the Panama Hotel (which is also a coffee shop) in Pioneer Square working on site messaging. We’ve been revamping the Welcome email that goes out to contributors. It now includes a few pretty images, such as our site logo, and a few more links to pertinent pages within the site. We want to make it easier for new contributors to understand the article submission process and navigate through the site.
Looks like fun huh?
As you may have noticed, we’ve added a few new articles that touch on topics that aren’t quite so family friendly. If you take a look through our “Latest Articles” list, you’ll see that we have “How To Give a Blow Job” right alongside “How To Understand the Holy Trinity“. This brings up an interesting issue…
Where do we draw the line?
One of the things that we at HowToDoThings pride ourselves on is our variety of interesting, useful topics. We want to provide information on as many topics as we possibly can (within reason), but we also don’t want to offend any readers or expose any youngsters to inappropriate content.
It seems perfectly reasonable to have articles like “How To Have Sex During Pregnancy” and “How To Talk to Your Kids About Sex“, but when authors start describing, in detail, how to perform certain sexual acts, it raises a red flag.
Lora Somoza is a well-known sex columnist and, while she inches close to the line with her article topics, she’s able to keep the tone of her articles light-hearted and tasteful…or at least I think so.
I think that articles on sexual topics would be interesting to and potentially help a lot of people as long as we’re able to draw the line properly and stick to it. However, I’d love to hear what you think about this.
Is it a good idea for HowToDoThings to add “how to” sex topics? Is that over the line? Does that call into question the integrity of the site as a whole?
Ok, well it’s at least the latest. I can’t really claim greatest…but maybe most fun…
I just wrote an article about How To Cook Food on Your Car Engine! We haven’t published it yet because we’re trying to see if we can get a site or two to link to it right when it goes live. I’ll add the link here when it’s published, which should be next week. But for now, here are some pictures to whet your appetite…for the article, not the food!
Step 1: Wrap up the food and put it on the warm part of the engine.
Step 2: Drive around until the food is cooked, unwrap it and prepare it.
Step 3: Eat it!!!
Ok, that’s not really much of a question. Faking an orgasm is obviously not the way to go, but it’s shockingly common. Most women have faked an orgasm before and, if you’re a guy, you may not know how to tell if your partner is really enjoying you as much as she seems to be. Luckily, expert sex columnist Lora Somoza has started writing for HowToDoThings and her first article, How To Tell When She’s Faking an Orgasm, will answer all your questions.
We featured Lora on the homepage in our “member spotlight”, so you may recognize her photo:
–Liz
Just look at these faces…
These are the faces of the HowToDoThings staff editors who are happily reviewing and editing your articles all day long.
You may notice that there are small changes to your articles sometimes, which probably isn’t that surprising considering you know that your articles are being edited by humans. However, you may also notice some bigger changes on occasion. For instance, you may have submitted an article entitled “How To Cut Your Grass”. While this is a good title that gets the point across, we may change it to “How To Mow the Lawn”.
There are a couple of different reasons that we may do this. The first of which is that we may be trying to make your title more clear and to-the-point. Hey, we do this all day, every day, so we have a lot of experience with these–sometimes awkward–”how to” titles. Another reason is that we have access to some keyword tools that allow us to know which words and phrases are more commonly searched.
After a quick search, I was able to find that “mow lawn” gets 3x the searches that “cut grass” does. So it makes sense to make that small change because, presumably, your article will now get 3x the traffic it would have before. That’s just one of the ways that we’re working to help increase traffic to your articles, which is beneficial to us both.
–Liz
