In case you missed it, the Open Homelab project has managed to make it to front page news on the Register yesterday!
Thank you very much to all of the team for the immense efforts they have put in over recent weeks. The contributions from the community are beginning to flow, like a half open tap! Hopefully within a few more weeks, that trickle becomes a firehose-like torrent of information! 🙂
If you like what the project is trying to achieve, and want to make sure it succeeds, the best way to make that happen is to contribute! The team have put in an awesome amount of work already, but the more people who contribute, the more the community will get back out of it in the long run…
It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to get involved by editing / adding to an existing article, or spend a little longer and create some entirely new content! Every little helps!
So the first week of the Open Homelab project has been brilliant! We have had thousands of visitors and page views, and lots of new content being added and updated. Without the support of the vCommunity, this project will not be a success, so thanks again to all the team involved and all of the community members who have contributed so far!
The most recent bit of great news we have to share, is that the site is now featured on http://cloudcredibility.com with a number of tasks, including several repeatable ones:
Open Homelab Tasks on CloudCredibility.com!
Thanks very much to Andy Nash and Noell Grier for arranging this, and for including them in Triple Points Tuesday as well! 🙂
Links to the tasks can be found below! What are you waiting for?
Homelab presentations are some of the most popular at technical user groups. The challenge is that unless they are recorded, the contents of these sessions is always lost at the end of the day, and only the attendees could consume the information and utilise it. What is needed is a method for crowdsourcing and capturing the collective homelab knowledge and experiences of the community, to provide people with a single source of information and advice which will help them make decisions on the best homelab solution for them, based on their individual requirements.
Although the site was started from a VMware user group, we believe that a homelab is a homelab! As such, we are keen for people across the IT community to contribute with their knowledge and tips across operating systems, hypervisors, tools and applications.
Technology agnosticism FTW!
So it is with that context that I am very pleased to announce that after a month of hard work from the team at the Open Homelab project, we are ready to open the virtual doors of this homelab library, to the public! 🙂
Its been a huge team effort with loads of great content created, but this is just the start; the acorn to the awesome metaphorical oak tree which the site could become with the help of other members of the community!
So without further ado, you can find the link to the site here:
Please bear in mind that the site is also in ALPHA status, and we are using an inexpensive web host until we see whether it becomes popular. As such, please accept our apologies if we do see any performance issues at alpha go-live, and report any bugs either via Twitter or the Open Homelab Bug Tracker!
The site is based on MediaWiki, and as such there are no restrictions on who can create and edit content on the site, the only thing we ask is that you create an account to help us avoid spammers!
If you would like to get involved, we would love to have you on board. This project will only be successful if the community get behind it and contribute to the site! All you have to do is spend a few minutes of your time either editing content, adding to it, or even writing a new article:
If you have any design talents, we are also looking for a unique but simple logo for the site. The one we have at the moment is just a placeholder! We would ideally like a few entries from different people and the community can choose their favourite! More information how you can be involved in designing our official logo can be found here:
Finally, I just want to say thank you to all the folk who have been involved in the project to date, and all of those who will do so in the future! Without the community, the site would not exist!
For those of you who keep a regular eye on my ramblings and mutterings, you may have noticed that since my presentation at the London VMUG a couple of weeks ago, I have been very quiet on the blogging front! There is, in fact, a reason for this!…
The session itself was really interesting and loads of ideas and methods I had never even heard or thought of came out, exactly what I had hoped would be the outcome! Subsequently a number of people volunteered to help create a site for the rationalisation and curation of all of this awesome content and knowledge, which we have dubbed the Open Homelab Project.
We are still in pre-alpha for the site itself, but here are a couple of screenshots of some of the content in production. Once it goes live it will be a full wiki site with the ability for any registered community member to edit, contribute to and create content! Once we have reached a reasonable quantity of initial content, then the site URL will actually be released!
Managing your Homelab from an Xbox One!
HP MicroServer
Requirements Gathering
Ye Trusty Intel NUC!
Right now we are keenly seeking a couple of things from community members who are interested in being involved:
Start by following our @OpenHomelab account on twitter for all the latest news and updates (as well as a few random tweets when I post using the wrong account -now I get how easy it is for corporate people to randomly tweet to the wrong pipe by accident!)
If you would like to get involved early on and help contribute to the initial release of content, please hit me up on twitter or DM the @OpenHomelab account with your email address for a Slack invitation.
If you have any design talents, we are looking for a unique but simple logo for the site. The one we have at the moment is just a placeholder! We would ideally like a few entries from different people and the community can choose their favourite! Main requirements are that the logo:
is square.
has a reasonably clean look.
has relatively few colours (in case we every want to print it on t-shirts, stickers, etc).
Looks good when shrunk to 135px by 135px (as this is the standard size of the logo in MediaWiki.
Beyond that, let your imagination run riot! All entries can be sent to me or the OpenHomelab project via Twitter DM.
So in answer to the question as to why I have haven’t been blogging for the last couple of weeks; it’s because I (along with the rest of the team) have been furiously producing content for the new site! I hope to return to normal service within a couple more weeks, but in the meantime, let me know if you want to be involved!
