Ezra obiga wrote me a PM a while back about ideas for crafts. He also set up a workspace page. I wrote some stuff on that page. Sometimes it get tricky online to understand one another. And often times it's hard to think of ways to know exactly how to help one another. What I wrote on the page was really categories of crafts that I might know something about, or at least seen a page with interesting information about. Really just taking notes to give me something to go back too. Then Ezra sent another PM.

The way I understood the second PM was that he didn't find what I wrote at the workspace helpful. When I was a boy I never liked to ask my father to help with homework; let's say and arithmetic problem. What I wanted was to get the answer, but when I would ask my father it always seemed he'd give me too much information and not just what I needed right at that time.

Ezra was particularly interested in marketing. So what I did was to go to the workspace and remove what I wrote and asked him to put information on that page about crafts he and others were already making.

What I think we need is a this discussion thread so we can talk and get feedback from one another. I also will go ahead and put back what I wrote on the workspace page. The workspaces are nice because member can add to them and change them around. Please share your ideas here and give me feedback so that I can be more helpful.

Also today I was thinking about how to share information. I saw the pictures of candle making and wondered about candle holders. I have an old book 55 New Tin Can Projects This book was written in the 1930's when everyone in America was very poor. I like the book because in the projects he shows how to work with sheet metal in detail using projects made from tin cans. Tin cans today are not quite like they were back then. Something that concerns me is the soldering on new cans, because the steel is generally coated with a plastic coating. I think it would work, but the metal would have to be sanded a little.

My main concern was not the particular project, but the idea of sharing project plans. So I went to the Ugandalinks wiki I made and copied the plans for this project. You can find them here. By the way everyone is invited to add to or edit pages at the wiki. The password is ned4lia.

Something that the wiki allows is for the pages to be saved as PDF files. That's very handy if people want to print the files out. But when I did that from the wiki page, the pictures I'd copied from the book and saved as JPEG files got cut off. I think that often times that feature of the wiki will work fine, it just didn't work this time. So I made a PDF file and added it to the wiki page.

By the way the wiki is not hard to get around in. But sometimes you may not see the table of contents. On the right side of the pages is a box with three tabs at the top. Click on the tab that says Sidebar and it will show a list of the pages on the wiki.

If anyone is curious, I would love it if you look at the page on making the candle holder. I'm interested in your feedback. Again it's not the particular project that's so important, but trying to invent ways to share useful information. Of course if you think the subject is interesting I would be happy to present more from the book. The author is very clever at showing ways to do things and the drawings are quite good.