Given Ben's point of
> So if I am arriving at Farm Hack because I heard it could be a good place to find a solution to a problem on my farm, the default tool organization that I want to see would be tools by category, so I can find tools that are relevant to my farm or my problem...
I added a quick feature so we now have faceted search on the Tools page by one parameter, the Tool Type parameter.
What does everyone think? It could probably use some styling and more parameters but I think having it as-is is better than not having it right now.
Good catch Dorn. I actually just made a whole bunch of improvements to the Tool form. Go ahead and update the Annie's All In One and let me know if it the changes make sense to you.
If you want any advice/help documenting please feel free to ask. I'm volunteering time to help get this website working. You can contact me directly on my contact form http://farmhack.org/user/8/contact.
> Before one thinks about a new plow design they must first realize the impact of a plow in general.
I take from that suggestion that one should first ask, "What is the impact that I would like to improve and in what ways would I like to see that impact improve? This point carries a lot of weight to me because I have first hand experience with the fall out in situations where folks define the software before they've fully defined the problem.
As the current Farm Hack website stands, we're trying to tackle a knowledge vs. wisdom issue. The Internet is a very effective place to make knowledge available but there is no internal mechanism on the Internet itself that takes all that knowledge and turns it into wisdom. I'm hoping that the functionality of this website will help people aggregate knowledge in each Tool's Forum and then refine that knowledge into wisdom on each Tool's Wiki. But alas, the __labels__ this method uses suggests that we start with a tool before we have the problem defined. Perhaps we should start with Problem Wikis that have associated Problem Forums...
> The most important tool to farming is the life in the soil.
Talking with Dorn Cox in the past few months and after a presentation by Ben Falk on Resilient Food Systems at the NOFAVT Winter conference, my eyes have been opened to the importance of healthy soil. Falk quoted someone in his presentation to the effect of, "Society has always been a struggle to keep its nutrients on the land and out of the sea."
Comments
Feature added: Faceted Search by Tool Type
Enabled Tools entries to have multiple "Tool Types"
Correction: Preview comment
If you want any advice/help documenting please feel free to ask
Best practice: Define a problem before defining a tool