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Comment by mostlyjason | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys I'm one of the technical editors for the guide. We created it because logging is really valuable for troubleshooting and monitoring systems. However, it's a complex topic and so many resources today are spread around on different forums. We wanted to have a place to consolidate all that useful information into something much easier to read. If it helps a dev or ops person solve a problem faster or easier than we've done our job!

There is still a lot of content to be written for languages like python, ruby, and more. We'd love to have more contributors, or even just suggestions for the site. I can also get in touch with any of the authors if you have questions for them.

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> many resources today are spread around on different forums

Centralizing the all the knowledge that's been written about a given topic isn't scalable in terms of contributions. It's far better to focus on enabling contributions than it is to focus on building a solution in which to put the contributions. There's a reason products like StackExchange are more successful at providing features for encouraging contributions than topic specific sites.

> There is still a lot of content to be written for languages like python, ruby, and more.. We'd love to have more contributors,

There is already a ton of contributions to logging solutions on the Internet. Why not build a solution categorizing those, instead of trying to build new content in a centralized (and I might add commercially curated) solution?

Also, where's the source to this "open source" project? I'm not seeing any links to code.

I think readability is a concern. Often when I'm learning a new technology I'd rather sit down with a good book on the topic rather than reading a bunch of forum posts. I can be pretty confident that it will cover the most important concepts, building up from basics to more advanced ones, and showing all the connections in between. A lot of times reading regular posts, you have to build all these connections yourself. We do link to really good resources and documentation where they are available though so if you have any to suggest please let me know!

I think the open source part of the title refers to the fact that we cover all different technologies from a variety of perspectives, not just a single vendor solution. Also, we allow contributions from anyone in the community. I couldn't find an easy way for WordPress to share or collaborate on source code, but if you think of a way, let me know. In the meantime, we're giving access to people who want to contribute.

I'd suggest building the content off a Github repo, rendering from markdown files. This solves the problem of contribution enablement. Rackspace has a docs/developer project that I was involved with for a very short time which has its source code available for use. Start there and get your content moved off Wordpress. Nothing against Wordpress, but it's not built for this. Also, code snippets.

Rackspace site on Github: https://github.com/rackerlabs/developer.rackspace.com

I agree with the readability part. It's important to curate from the stance of educating the multitudes quickly. Having disparate content can be an issue in starting the education, but variety is the spice of life - and use cases as time goes on. I'd recommend content + reference as a solution here. Cookbook style, if you will.

Keep in mind I've spent a fair amount of clock cycles thinking about this than most people. I've rejected things like logging standards as well. That doesn't mean I'm right, but it is, at the least, a data point for you.

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