Bob Cope said:
I don’t intend to start a lengthy diatribe
Bob C.
What’s a diatribe?
Rooster,
I am not sure but I think it is a whole bunch of people that ban together to lose weight
I’m on both sides of this. I have to agree with the sentiment expressed earlier that the “atta boys” do keep the fires stoked on any given project, so as a builder, it’s fun to get them. It’s not entirely about stroking egos, though realistically if no one commented at all, who here would bother posting anything? It’s human nature to desire positive reinforcement. But there’s definitely an energy that comes from a lively discussion of a project.
Having said that, I’m notoriously guilty of reading others’ build logs and not posting anything. It’s certainly not for lack of appreciation of the effort, but in many cases it’s more of a “I’ll wait to see how this develops” kind of thing. Hard to say exactly why, really. But I also know that a lot more people read my stuff than actually post on it, too, so I figure I’m not alone.
I will say that posting and updating logs is tedious. I’ve got four projects on the workshop right now, and I haven’t taken a single photo of a darned one of 'em. I’ll probably do something once they’re finished, but in terms of “in progress” stuff, sometimes I just want to work on a project for my own benefit and not worry about sharing it at the moment. Maybe I should, just to keep the blog fresh…
Later,
K
David Russell said:
What’s a diatribe?
It’s a bunch of fat Injuns that joined Jenny Craig…
I must say that I really enjoy reading the logs and following the progress of others, especially when there are loads of pictures and other graphics to satiate my voracious appetite for this hobby. I too am guilty of not posting backslapping encouragement and rather selfishly gloss over the “ata boys” to harvest all the good ideas and techniques for my own gratification.
There can never be too many logs, even if they are basic beginner stuff as this is the essence of a forum. What does get up my snout a bit is irrelevant trivia and jokes totally unrelated to garden railroading - also the impolite and sometimes downright aggressive disrespect for the opinions of contributors by the occasional (sometimes regular) visitor to the forums.
I don’t know about the rest of you guys but I’m finding the postings to be somewhat dry at the moment; perhaps I’m missing all the build challenge logs?
Kevin Strong said:
…I will say that posting and updating logs is tedious. I’ve got four projects on the workshop right now, and I haven’t taken a single photo of a darned one of 'em. I’ll probably do something once they’re finished, but in terms of “in progress” stuff, sometimes I just want to work on a project for my own benefit and not worry about sharing it at the moment. Maybe I should, just to keep the blog fresh…
Later,
K
Kevin this is now why I just take any progress pics as I work on it, but wont post anything until the end, then its just one or two longer posts showing the progression to finish but that’s alot easier to do than dragging a log out over many days or weeks or months.
Red said
I don’t know about the rest of you guys but I’m finding the postings to be somewhat dry at the moment; perhaps I’m missing all the build challenge logs?
I know what ya mean Red, I’m guessing yer kinda new so welcome aboard! I had noticed a huge upswing in stuff being built since the first of the year. Yeah the challenge really gave it a spike, but now we got guys who have really never posted much in the past posting good stuff! I’m sure it all will come in waves, and as many are getting ready for ECLSTS or just getting ready for spring in general, we’ll prolly see less building and more track and layout maintence for a couple of months, then when the high heat of summer hits again…we’ll retreat back into our shops to escape the heat…
I have learned sooo much reading the logs and asking questions when I didn’t understand something. Please don’t ever think it is a waste of time. Anyone doing these projects and writing and explaining them to others helps so many more people than the comments posted would ever reflect!
I like to read the builds also, what I don’t like is search for a cool build three years later because now I have time and money to build something similar and all the pictures are gone. ;- (
I should also point out I don’t have many posts here, but I think I have read at least 50% of the threads looking for information.
David Schmitz said:
I like to read the builds also, what I don’t like is search for a cool build three years later because now I have time and money to build something similar and all the pictures are gone. ;- (
I should also point out I don’t have many posts here, but I think I have read at least 50% of the threads looking for information.
David,
When you get to one of those old posts with missing pictures, just ask if the original poster still has the pictures. I know I have gone back and edited a number of my posts to reflect the updated picture location.
I’m with David! That really frosts my cake.
David Schmitz said:
I like to read the builds also, what I don’t like is search for a cool build three years later because now I have time and money to build something similar and all the pictures are gone. ;- (
I should also point out I don’t have many posts here, but I think I have read at least 50% of the threads looking for information.
I’ve been guilty of that. The reason is most web hosting sites have limited storage capacity and over time it becomes necessary to delete old pics so newer ones can be posted. Sucks but then if a thread hasn’t been active and falls back to page 16 its easy to justify the deletion.
To be fair I do try hard to only delete redundant pics and to try to always keep the most relevant pics so the log continues to make sense.
Me too. My freight shed gets too full of pics and I clean them out once in a while.
The solution I’ve found for build logs that I enjoy reading, and may want to reference in the future is to save them as a PDF. It doesn’t take too much storage space to save a PDF on your hard drive and then you have it for future reference. For example see the discussion about Richard S. elevated benchwork. I’ve got all the PDF’s saved on my hard drive because I want to be able to reference them in the future, and don’t want to worry about trying to find them, and/or finding them without pictures. It’s fairly easy to either copy/paste the thread into a document file, or just CTRL Print Screen and save only a part of the thread.
I view it as only saving the articles from a magazine that catch my eye. Don’t save the whole magazine if you don’t have room, just copy what you need. Same thing applies to this build treads.
Craig
I just wanted to add that I wasn’t picking on this forum, searching for old posts and having the pictures missing happens on most forums I frequent. I agree with capturing to PDF, or in my case I copy to a ms word document.
Dave S