I wanted to make this quick post to tip off some folks about a project I've been trying to get off the ground on Twitter (apologies for the clickbait title).
Since 2018, I've been building up a portfolio of Python "How to" articles. At this point, there are about 30 articles in the series, and I've been trying to continuously improve them. For example, about a year ago, I decided to add performance metrics to the articles, so people could see the performance difference between different solutions.
Then, last August, I started making my own YouTube videos to enhance the content a bit. Eventually, I even came up with the idea of adding coding challenges at the end of each article, so readers could try applying what they learned.
Unfortunately, as Google continued to punish sites for being "too slow," I ended up overhauling my theme to improve its speed. In fact, I ended up removing a ton of bloat including comments (which people rarely used anyway). Of course, this caused some problems. After all, I added challenges to my articles. Where the heck were people supposed to share their solutions?
As a result, I decided to push my readers off to social media! Now, I have my own hashtag (#RenegadePython) where folks can share solutions to my many challenges. For instance, here's one I made today for converting text into mocking SpongeBob case:
I would love it if the folks of DEV could help me get this project off the ground by contributing some solutions of your own. Anyone up to it? If so, here's the link again to my series. Just about every article has a challenge!
Alternatively, I have a list of 100 code snippets which will give you a nice overview of the series.
Top comments (1)
Potentially setting up a community forum (possibly on a subdomain) would be a good solution. I'd also recommend using the utterances commenting plugin, which uses github issues as a storage system, and is lightweight. You can also use your forums (flarum, bbpress or discourse) as a commenting system for your blog, which means that the discussion happens on your site.
Having said that, you don't want to discount social media (which obviously you haven't done), but creating a platform that is more indexable, structured and community-like can help with your goal.