LEDE Showcase page

I posted mine, too, mostly as a straw-man proposal. If you two want to hammer out some common wording, Go For It! Thanks.

How can we lower the barrier to get new users interested in LEDE?

There are people who probably are interested but who are reluctant to take the dive.
What are the main reasons that hold them back.

The technical aspect?
The community aspect? (not wanting to look noob-ish?)
The fear to render a router into a brick or other work of art?

For instance with the fear example a wiki page that explains a few things about flashing that could take that fear away, or at least make it more easy to make the choice to give it a try more easy.

The community aspect will need us as a community to be inviting to new users. And that may not be easy for just anyone, as new users have many questions, and may prefer to ask then to human beings instead of using a search engine.
How to we then deal with that? Answer anyway but short? Do the search for them (and post the link) with a short answer? What whould be most inviting for new users?

The technical aspect. I'm not a developer myself and i never will be one. But i want far to often to do something with a router that's not actually ready yet. And then my questions get dev style solutions. I can imagine that new users may run into the same thing. and THAT could put them off.

I think short video tutorials would be a big help here.

For every FAQ a short video answer on a good youtube alternative that offers better privacy then 'googletube'. A decentralised platform like mediagoblin would be cool but i'm not sure if that is a feasible route.
If routers where a bit more powerful then we could host stuff like that decentralised on our own?
Bold suggestion? :smiley:

Any additional information helping people get LEDE would never hurt.

Having said that...

  1. I've had my fair share of playback issues with "better than googletube" providers. While I understand the privacy concerns, I believe youtube would be the best solution.
  2. In general, I'm not crazy about video tutorials, they're the last thing I'll try when looking something up, as many will suffer from annoying background music, inaudible voice, hard to read text and inability to jump the next step right away -- you'll have to wait until video catches up to where you are.

I'd take a good text-based tutorial with highly visible and easy to copy code (should any be ran from CLI) or descriptive screenshots any day over a video.

I hope that the above would not discourage you from making your own videos tho. I'm sure that if you the video tutorial pitfalls, your videos would be highly popular.

That's exactly what I am thinking about video tutorials.
With text, you can quickly read across and find the interesting part.
With video, you practically have to watch the whole video, in order not to miss anything important.

In addition to this: Creating videos takes a considerable amount of time, which is often underestimated. If somebody has the time, the knowledge about the respective tutorial content, the knowledge about creating high quality videos, the necessary hardware (cam): Yes please, go ahead!

For easy embedding of those videos, we have the vshare plugin installed. See https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:vshare for usage and syntax.

Example: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/easycwmp

@stangri, @tmomas

I also agree on the comment about video tutorials, but in many other area's i see that new users often tend to use video tutorials before anything else these days.

So in this regard it then would be good to review and re-iterate. But that takes even more effort...

Or we could search on the tube for existing video's and use those. (if a good one exists on the topic)

And if a video had bad audio we could eventually download edit re-do the audio track. Then we don't have to do the recording, just remix existing content. Or is that considered to be stealing these days?

Those people use the software that they downloaded gratis so why would we not be allowed to use their recording? (This way they also give back to the community right?)

We could also make a forum section where endusers can post links to their tutorials!
This way we can give feedback on those tuts, and maybe we get tutorials from people who are really good at making video tuts. This way we can teach a thing or two and learn a thing or two while reviewing their work.

They may not have coding skills, but if their video skills can help then they still give back to the community. Maybe we could make a list of tutorials that we need, and then let people pick a topic that they know something about. Though they will need feedback so that they can improve their work.

Screenshots would also make a great addition to wiki tutorials.

Again because new users most likely will start with the GUI.

Speaking about GUI, I would like to see mouseovers in the GUI that show the command that coresponds to the GUI action. This way the GUI gradually can teach about the CLI commands. And it could break down the barrier to doing CLI stuff simply by having some visible hints in the GUI.

This could eventually look cluttered, But if it is in a theme then users who want to turn the clutter of can switch back to the old theme?
And yea... someone would have to build that theme and maintain it.

Maybe someone has a clever idea to meet somewhere in the middle?

After you make your changes in Web UI, hit SAVE instead of SAVE & APPLY and then you'll have another button in the top-right corner CHANGES: x. Clicking on this button will bring up a window which shows underlying changes to the uci config.

yes, but tats only if you go look for it. And after making a change. New users will want to know before they change something. But indeed this is already a lot of useful info. And it made me realise that i spend more time in the CLI then anywhere else, I totally forgot about it.

This stuff deserves i spot on the showcase page.

I personally find it a preferable solution to overloading UI with hints about corresponding CLI commands. And there are other ways to learn how to set things up thru CLI than looking at the web interface.

true,

it doesn't have to be like i described, the idea mainly was aimed at having things on screen that teach new users things in a gradual manner. As an inviting way to make people more curious about the underlying code. And even if people are not interested at all this could still teach them something.

Instead of hiding the underlying technology, expose glimpses of the technology, to lower the barrier.
The more the people know before they look deeper the better.

It does not need to be an instant overhaul of the GUI, but something to consider when some part of the GUI is updated to add a few hints, for instance with new features.

Since there hasn't been much further motion toward a "showcase page", I created the following draft for a replacement home page on the LEDE site:

https://lede-project.org/playground/richb-hanover/start

Please review (and edit) the page with an eye toward:

  • Things that aren't true (I wasn't sure if LEDE has a package for parental control/time of day control...)
  • Big topics/features that aren't mentioned

Once this settles down, I'll ask the admin to update the home page with this final content. Thanks.

I want to point out that I never intended the LEDE showcase page to be a replacement or have a prominent presence (besides being linked from) the start page.

So I'd suggest to move the discussion of the changes to the start page to its own thread. Having said that, I hope that you can also migrate my suggestion for the "Why use LEDE" section to that new thread on start page discussion. As a matter of fact I was about to send it to @tmomas anyways.

I wouldn't make it that prominent either.

1 Like

OK. Let's make a separate "showcase" page. I encourage you to list everything that makes you proud of the LEDE project there.

Update: I created a "LEDE Showcase" page at https://lede-project.org/showcase

I believe the home page should have a prominent link to the Showcase page, so that someone who comes to the site is one click away from learning about why we're so excited about the project. I have revised the draft of the Home Page accordingly: https://lede-project.org/playground/richb-hanover/start

I renew my request to you:

Missing:

  • Links to howtos (VPN server/client, guest wifi, parental control, ...)
  • Make your router more than just a router
  • webcam surveillance / timelapse
  • smarthome central

NAS
TOR gateway
Torrent downloader
Ad-blocker
Pirate-box
Library-box
Datalogger (with some hacking)
Audio-streamer
Media server
Webserver
hidden service (TOR)
VPN server
RFID tag reader (with some hacking)
Message signaling (LED-control)

Though i would actually wait to add these use cases until they actually surface on the web then add them and place a link. Having a showcase page should be based on facts. Or at least make clear what is hypothetical and what has already be done.

But to be fair all those things are still based on OpenWRT

I believe right now it's premature to create the Showcase page when there's no content to link to. Maybe I didn't express myself well originally, but I did not envision this page as the list of reasons to use LEDE, but the list of things LEDE can do/problems it solves with extra packages.

The difference between simple package list and the Showcase page being the layman's terms wording and links to the instructions (install adblock, set up openvpn, dnscrypt, tor, etc.). For this, an existing list of recipes is needed, so I'd keep the Showcase page in the playground for now.

It's good though to prepare the showcase page, this also gives a sense of direction and can inspire others to come up with other cool idea's

Those recipes that's a task in itself.

I still have to look at that adblock.

Then I don't get your point in disagreeing to richb's showcase page, since your proposal in the playground provides less possible links to howto pages than richb's does, and mainly contains reasons i/o things to do.

What's common for both pages: The heading says "Why use LEDE?".
As a reader, I would then expect to see something like "because...", i.e. a reason.
Therefore I don't think it would be wrong to include both, reasons and things to do on a showcase page.

The alternative would be to hande those two subjects on separate pages

  • Why use LEDE? -> provide reasons to use LEDE
  • What can I do with LEDE? -> provide things LEDE enables you to do

I created an overview of proposals: https://lede-project.org/playground/showcase2
I added some links to indicate that there are some pages missing.
Feel free edit as you like.

@stangri & @richb-hanover you are not that far apart with your proposals.

Regarding optical appearance: I like the bulleted + bold style that @bobafetthotmail applied to the reasons, in addition to using short keywords. Both provide optical and logical structure.