Cody Miller wrote: > We just launched our new flagship electrical engineering community > today. Who is "we"? > It is called "EEWeb". The focus of the community is to create > a place for hardware engineers to call home. Isn't that what element14 is supposed to be? At least they don't hide who they are, which is Farnell. I have no problem with a company trying to do this, but a big problem if they somehow hope for or rely on your ignorance. > Here is a link to the site: http://www.eeweb.com/ I see a DigiKey logo by the search bar, and then later after scolling to th= e bottom of the page I see "DigiKey Corporation". So are you guys trying to do a element14 knockoff? It kinda looks like that. I think element14 is a great idea, but so far have been dissappointed by th= e execution. If you guys can do better, I'm all for it, but I would like it stated up front who you are and what you're trying to get out of it. > We would love some feedback we have spent over two years developing > this site. OK, I'm writing these comments as I'm signing up and exploring the site. I think your intellectual property rights license is unreasonable: "Content that is covered by Intellectual Property rights like photos, schematics, files, and videos, you agree to specifically give us the following permission: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with EEWeb ("IP License"). This IP license ends when you delete your IP content or account." If you want people to post meaningful stuff, you have to let them retain ownership. You might say that anything posted is automatically granted a free unlimited right to be copied, but otherwise giving specifically you unlimited IP rights is ridiculous. If it's to simplify letting people use the information on the site, then there is no need to grant only you the rights. This means you're trying to get away with something hoping most people won't notice or forget. For example, if I mention a technique I've patented, does that mean you end up with rights to use my patent for free? Clearly that's unreasonable. Even worse, you apparently then have the righ= t to license it to others. I can understand posting on your site constitutes "public disclosure", but unless the whole point is for you to grab IP from unsuspecting contributors= , you need to fix your policy. I see on the profile page after creating a account that there is a way to add a "quote", apparently to things you will post later. Do we really need to let people inflict this content free drivel on others. This would be a nice opportunity to make a clean break from such crap. I thought I'd upload a profile picture, but nothing is telling me the aspec= t ratio of the maximum space to display it. Even better would be to know the exact pixel dimensions you will use so I can format a picture to look best on your system. The grayed out head and shoulders look square, so I'll upload a square picture and make it large enough so that when you shrink it you hopefully won't add too many artifacts. I uploaded a 1024x1024 square picture and you seem to have shrunk it well enough, but it's **GRAY**!! You never heard of color pixels? Do you back up your stuff on paper tape too!? Now that I've uploaded a picture, I was going to poke around and possibly set other parameters in my profile. But now any way to get there seems to be suddenly gone. Oh, I see it now, there's a "edit your profile" link right below the picture. That used to be "edit your picture", which is probably why I didn't notice it right away. Now that I know it's there, I guess this is OK, although it was confusing at first. I had previously selected the "professional" radio button before deciding t= o upload a picture, but now that selection is gone. Argh, doing it again. I see things I can set like title, summary, interests, and the like, but I'm reluctant to do any of that without having a better understanding of where and how these things will be displayed. Just as a test, I created a link called "Resume" to my online resume. I'm not doing more until I see how this is presented. Enough with my setup, now it's time to see what's here. One thing such a site can offer is a good set of web forums properly organized in a comprehensible and findable tree structure. This is where element14 fails miserably. There is just disorganized stuff all over the place and you never have a feel you know what all is there or where you currently are within whatever structure there might be. Accross the top there are a bunch of links like Home, Design news, Discussions, etc. Home seems to be a very busy looking (that's not a compliment) bunch of fluff you're trying to push on us rather than anything I care about. However, I'm not sure what I expected there anyway. I guess a introduction and overview of the site to help make sense of the chaos instead of adding to it would have been nice. Oh well. I'm most interested in a nicely organized set of forums, so let's see what'= s here and how hard it is to find and make sense of. Trying the "discussions= " link, since that seems the most likely to lead me there of the presented choices. Hmm, I see exactly 4 "catagories". Maybe because the site is new= , but I would have expected you to create the empty hierarchy of topics and let users fill them in. Am I looking at only the topics people have posted= ? If so, where's the topic hierarchy? What else is here? Why are you tellin= g me the number of "replies" a catagory has? That makes no sense. Posts hav= e replies, possibly you can call posts in a thread replies of the thread, but I don't see how a "catagory" should have "replies". Catagories should have threads and possibly sub-catagories. I'm already confused. Clicking on "ANALOG" to see what it is. I see a question by you about current sensing. This is clearly showing me what I call a "thread", which is very misleading to call a "catagory". I also now have to make my browse= r window wider to eliminate the horizontal scroll bar. I hate that. HTML should fit my window, not the other way around. It's *my* screen, not yours. Now I see the reason for the width is that there are a whole bunch of ads along the right side. Don't do that. You'd do far better to advertise your stuff by association, not by getting in my face. Now I see that the thread posts are a fixed size in pixels. There's no excuse for that. Let it flow according to my window size. You don't know how big my screen is or how much other stuff I want to see at the same time. HTML is designed to flow. It really pisses me off when a web designer decides what the formatting on my screen should look like. Now I see your post has a small picture in its lower left corner. At that size I can see it's a opamp circuit but can't make out any of the writing o= r other details. I'm guessing it's a thumbnail to a larger picture you posted. Why can't it at least fill the width of the post area. What's the point of showing me a small unusable thumbnail if I have to expand it every time? Clicked on the thumbnail and the full size picture popped up right over par= t of your post and a part of the next post below. The schematic is now clearly readable, but apparently I can't look at it and the other posts at the same time. The image itself is actually smaller than the width of the post area, so there is no reason it couldn't have been displayed in line. I'm now going to reply to your post, mostly to test drive the process. I don't really have anything to say, but I'll try to come up with something a= s a excuse to do a reply. Hmm. Now I notice that your post has a "discuss this question" button (why do you assume the first post of a thread is always a question? That seems wrong) and other posts have a "Reply" link. I'm not sure what the difference is and can't imagine why there should be one, but I'll try the "discuss.." button. OK, that brings up a little edit box immediately below your post. That makes sense, but how do I quote whatever part of your post I want to respon= d to? I don't like just blurting out something without giving a little of th= e context, especially since there are other replies and it will get confusing quickly who said what to whom. I wrote some rather content free stuff to your original vague (I suspect you were just seeding the forum anyway) question and hit "submit reply". I now see my post at the bottom of the thread, but am bothered about its context not being clear. It's not obvious I replied to your original post as apposed to one of the other replies. I care about neatness, clarity, an= d such details. If the system won't allow me to post that way, I won't use the site. Oh well, gotta get back to some real work now. I guess at this point I fee= l about EEweb similar to element14. It's a great idea but ideas are cheap an= d it's all about the execution. EEweb looks promising and already perhaps a little clearer than element14. I didn't find what I was really hoping to, which was a well organzied set of forums with all the normal features one expects of forums. However, the site is new and it looks promising. I'll keep a eye on it over the next few weeks to see if anything materializes such that I feel comfortable using it. ******************************************************************** Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products (978) 742-9014. Gold level PIC consultants since 2000. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .