New "How To" Section is now up

[Lynn Miner]

The GT40s.com How To section is now up and public. Myself and Richard Woerz are the moderators of this section and I have made about 20 posts to kick it off. This is a limited access area much like a reference library. The good news is that it is focused on specific topics and can't get lost with all the comments and diversions that lead some threads to lose their direction. The bad news is that site moderators are the only ones that can make a post. That means my avatar goes with it. Ron Earp is looking into a way around this but tells me it doesn't look good. What I do is make sure the entire first paragraph details who generated it (if I didn't) and how to contact that person to give accolades or complaints.

Send emails (preferably not PM's) to me with your ideas. Submissions need to be a text document with no pictures. The pictures need to be sent separately so they can be imbedded into the text. If you send a completed doc with pix inside, it has to go into an FTP site and can't be searched or indexed.

I hope this makes sense. If it doesn't I'm sure you will tell me.

I think this will greatly enhance the entire GT40s.com experience and we look forward to your inputs.

Lynn Miner
minerl@theofficenet.com

[Steve Briscoe]

Thank you. This will really help. The Adlers did something like this with Pantera International by publishing a reference guide to all the "How To" articles dating back to the beginning of the publication. It's invaluable when trying to quickly reference topics.

Have a great 2008!
Steve

[JohnC]

Way to go Lynn; how about one more little request?

Since the How To's are going to be posted randomly by date, What about putting a locked, sticky "Table of Contents" post at the top of the section which gives the major category for the How To's, a "brief" description, and a hyperlink to the article? Hopefully this could be done in one single post, albeit eventually a long one, but one which you or an Admin could continually edit. Having a TOC in multiple posts, I think, would defeat the purpose.

I know the search engine here is good, but many of us may just like to have a troll through the section without searching for anything specific. A TOC might help us do that.

[Ron Earp]

Hi John,

We could easily do that, nice idea.

However before we do any of that, what I'd like to see is folks offering support to Lynn in the way of technical articles. The subject of a How To section has been brought up before and even tried on GT40s.com. But nobody ever stepped up to take care of doing it on a large scale.

Now that we have a place like this I'd love to see users writing articles for the areas. If we don't get a "critical mass" of articles together that are meaningful then it won't make sense to continue the subforums. Please contact Lynn if you are interested in doing something like this. I've seen lots of such articles in the old GTD Club magazines, that type of thing is perfect for these subforums.

Ron

[Steve C]

Lynn,

Kudos to you for coming up with the idea for this Forum and for your tech posts to date which are: informative, clearly written and well illustrated.....Thanks too to Ron for adding this feature to the Site.

Steve

[Nicholas Gomez]

It would be great fun to see build ups like they have on Build Book Usa - Page 1. Come to think of it, Ron Champion's Build Your Own Sportscar by Haynes created a huge interest in Seven replicas and perhaps improved the availability and cost for Sevenesque parts. What if there were a GT40 ISO 'blueprint' or 'architecture' for a monocoque GT40, which enthusiasts could build by themselves, piece by piece, either opting for period parts (aircraft wiper motor, etc.) or whatever is latest and best, which is still backwards compatible and matches up to the GT40 ISO 'blueprint'/'architecture' requirements? Wouldn't that be great? The world's first 'shareware' GT40? (At least in design).

[Ron Earp]

Hi Nick,

There is a Builder's Log forum here:

http://www.gt40s.com/forum/gt40-build-logs/

There are a couple of hundred build threads there with some good details.

As far has a "open source" GT40 I have not seen that happen but there are some old threads about that topic.

Ron