I'm with Mark, it'd be great to have an area to show off the work of others.

I'm with Mark too. I've wondered if it is appropriate to share examples here. This post certainly is certainly an example of "Have something interesting" listed on the front forum page..so maybe this is the place.

As a side note...one thing I've noticed with the forum is that checking "notify me of follow-ups" doesn't seem to notify me of anything. Is it supposed to email?

Actually, I just had another look at the gallery page. Looks like submitting work is encouraged already!

"And do send us your own stuff you want to show."

OK let's discuss this.

I've been thinking about this since clem posted something about a user section:
http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/shared_2007-02-06-12-00-29

I roughly discern between "milestones" (e.g. advancements in NodeBox libraries, bigger projects and cases) and "examples" (e.g. small scripts, cool output, best practices). Milestones should end up in the gallery and the tutorial. People would then have to mail me some screenshots, a word of explanation, preferably some code and a website address.

But there's currently no strategy to contribute examples to the site.

There are a number of solutions we can work out.

1) A lazy approach: something quick like the "add a link" on the Processing site. Users would then post a link to their own site where they can do whatever they want.

2) A rigid approach: a submit form where users can post a screenshot, a description and some code to the NodeBox site.

3) A chaotic approach: I could open up a part of the NodeBox wiki, which has an easy TinyMCE interface to create and modify new pages. Users would then have to request a login and password.

What do you think?

As for the follow-ups, I'm not aware of any bugs, but then again the source code isn't mine. Could you confirm that follow-ups are not ending up in your junk mail?

Some thoughts on the proposed solutions:

1) Easiest to implement, but there's a risk of it requiring a lot of housekeeping. As NodeBox is the kind of tool that many will experiment with, submitters are likely to place their images in temporary directories on their servers. We may end up with a lot of broken links. Then again, we may not!

2) Seems the best option to me. Structured and integrated.

3) Chaotic, as you say. I wouldn't suggest this approach - it seems too convoluted.

Perhaps a worthy alternative would be to use and promote a Flickr group for NodeBox. I've just created one: http://www.flickr.com/groups/nodebox/
I don't think this should replace any of the three above options. Perhaps it's just a place to put all your nodebox related work rather than specific images you want to show.

Please do join the Flickr group if you have anything to share.

I suspect that most of the posts will be of form: 'here is something cool, what do you think?' If this is true, then I suspect we would be best served by your #2 approach. A wiki is great when you want users to structure data in complex ways but since this will probably be a tree with one branch, a simple forum just like this with the ability to upload a small photo would work really well. It might encourage a more cohesive community if users had logins and posting history so that if someone posts something I like I can easily find his/her other posts.

On the other hand, the nice thing about the chaotic approach is that you often get unexpected results that are interesting. Also, it sounds like your wiki software is already set up to handle multiple user accounts so maybe it would be easier to make part of the wiki more forum-like or encourage users to use it in a more structured way.

On the business of email followups, I've checked my junk mail and found nothing. I wonder if the hyphen in my email address is triggering a software glitch.

OK thanks for the suggestions.

I'm working on a solution that combines some of the ideas. A forum with a structured input form that supports image uploads, but which internally generates wiki pages. That's nice because we have the best of both worlds: a structured forum, and a back-end to directly modify the forum content (so in the future more people can have access to the wiki, or contributors would be able to edit their own posts etc...)

Searching will work as well so you can query for users and keywords.

E-mail follow-ups will be dealt with later, I'll have to review some code. It's a handy feature but the whole thing with storing people' e-mail address and sending them unwanted mail makes me kinda uncomfortable. First let's see if we can have a forum that supports images.

How about a NodeBox menu item "Post to Flickr"? Or maybe "Share" - which could both post the current image to a photosharing site and post a snapshot of the source code to a nodebox.net wiki?

I think that much of Processing's success is due to the source code being included by default when exporting to a webpage. I regularly use someone else's code/sketch as the jumping-off-point for my own Processing sketch.

If I built the functionality to post directly from NodeBox to some web-site/service might than be included in a future release?

Sounds great.

Can we have a direct link to Tom van de Velde's proposed Flickr group?

The moment someone would upload a post to the NodeBox site I have a username and an image on the server. Is that enough to go on or what kind of information would you need?

Flickr has a relatively good API, and there are useful open-source classes that allow you to interface with it easily. The most popular class is phpFlickr: http://phpflickr.com/

If NodeBox project owners send me a Flickr mail, I can make you administrators for the group. Seems logical that you're the ones in control.