We’ve talked about it over the past few weeks — there’s clearly a lack of content about Gladys (Gladys) that would help new users picture it, and above all attract more users who would find us via Google.
I’ve started listing topics where content is missing, and I think we could split the different articles to write to save time.
Knowing that to write content you don’t need to know how to code, you just need to know how to write
I suggest using the tool https://www.notion.so/ which will allow everyone to type content in a simple editor, and then we’ll do a Markdown export to import the content into the site very easily.
@Pierre-Gilles I’ve often seen something on the web that I find extremely useful: a tutorial video is accompanied by a text version that covers the elements of the video.
It seems a bit redundant, but personally I prefer a written tutorial to a video (if only for the links, copy/paste, etc…)
So in what you describe: heating savings, etc… we find what we’ve already discussed for videos. So for me the two should be linked.
On one side the YouTube video which in the description links back to the article on the forum / the site
On the other, someone who lands on the article also has an embedded video to watch if they wish.
Have you subscribed to a paid plan on Notion? Because the free plan allows 10 guests, so that can fill up quickly — after that I think we can probably share and split accounts to free up slots
Yes, totally — I’ll make videos too, but videos are very time-consuming to shoot so they’ll be done gradually; the idea here was really to make progress on the written content which in my opinion is more important (currently, the number one source of traffic on the site, and by far, is Google Search)
No I haven’t subscribed, and given the pricing I don’t plan to subscribe
We’ll do separate docs per group, and we’ll keep the « public » doc as the reference for the articles to write
I’m starting today, for my part, by writing a first article « Smart Home - The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started » where I’ll write a long piece that summarizes how to start in home automation from scratch.
If I made that remark, it’s because I’m doubtful about one person making a video (you) and someone else writing an article on the same subject. For me the article must follow exactly the video’s script (and vice versa), which implies that either one person does both, or one production comes first and the other aligns with it. Otherwise we risk having different information and it can cause confusion.
Also, I set up two motion sensors in front of my house. This allows me to turn on the light on my porch and the one in front of my garage under certain conditions. In short, the very basic thing that quite a few people might want to do.
But I ran into a dumb little problem: if I decide to turn on the porch light myself by hand to leave it on for 2 hours… then with my automation scenes it would turn off as soon as there was no more movement (after 90sec)… and that’s when the home automation becomes dumb.
So I had to create a fake MQTT device that serves as an « indicator » to know whether the light is in automatic or manual operating mode; it’s a simple switch whose state I check in my scenes.
Could this be the subject of a tutorial or not? I think it could help some people better understand the usefulness of fake devices for very simple things. I’d like to get your opinions before I dive in
For me, the ideal would be to make sure to include, for each solution, a link to the appropriate tutorial (for example, directly in the comparison table).
Maybe add a Tutorials category with subcategories (energy saving, alarm, heating management, pool management, roller shutter management etc. to be defined) on the site with tutorials possibly rewritten according to a style guide that you can define and that we submit to you beforehand so that you can validate and then publish on the site?
You can find them on the forum of course but you don’t always know they exist and they are not always labeled as tutorials; this would provide an entry point for newcomers, they see the product and what you can do with it! And it might also be better indexed by Google too.
