The tmpdir project has been going for 4 years now. We have 58 users on this site and site traffic has grown moderately:
It appears the most popular posts are those helping solve some specific problem versus general information, news, etc.
The podcast has 31 episodes, and we’ve published 76 issues of our newsletter.
The number of listens and followers of the podcast on spotify is growing:
The top podcasts from Apple and Spotify include:
While not a resounding community success, it appears we are providing some value to the world. Perhaps one of the challenges is the TMPDIR project is not focused exclusively on one project or technology.
Some of the benefits I’ve found from this project:
- use of private Discourse categories for project work discussions and chat. Each customer has their own private category and relevant chat groups.
- excellent platform for “daily posting.” Editing content in Discourse is a very nice, low-friction process. It is a great micro-blogging platform.
- online notebook – a convenient place to record notable projects, events, articles, etc. Tagging makes things easy to find.
- a good place for brainstorming
- reusable content – if I help someone with a general problem, I try to write up the solution here first, and then share it.
Has it been worth effort/cost? It is hard to measure. But it only costs $5/mo for a Digital Ocean server to host the site, so we’ll keep it going and see where it leads.
I continue to be super impressed with the Discourse platform. Upgrades have been flawless. New features are added regularly. The new Chat feature eliminates the need for Signal, Slack, and other chat tools. It is an excellent collaboration tool and I think any organization should have their own instance.
Thoughts? What have you found useful? What is annoying? What changes would you like to see?