[VA] New update #011 available in my HP site (11 new files 11)

[Valentin Albillo]

 
Hi, all:

A full week has elapsed since I posted the first message above, so a few facts and a conclusion are in order. In order:

The facts:

Fact 1: When I first announced my new site here, after my old one at Multimania had gone extinct, I was very happy to be able to provide my many HP-calc-related materials for free in a convenient, no-annoyances way to everyone interested. That included what in my humble opinion are quality programs and pictures, perfectly documented in formal-paper, arxiv-like fashion. I intended to do ~10-file uploads on a regular weekly schedule, and I did just that for all 11 uploads.

I also intended to publish new full-fledged Articles on a monthly basis and, as my first 32 were very well received by people over the years, I thought the new ones would be equally welcomed and would gather a lot of interest.

Those were my thoughts at the beginning, several months ago. Now fast-forward to today, 2019-01-22, and we find this:

My latest update #11 included 11 new files, a whole new Article among them, the very first one in 11 years. It's a complex article, which took about a month of free-time to create and format the 7-page text, create the 13 diagrams, insert the program listing a step at a time, create the examples, and proof-read and polish it all.

Then I also had to painstakingly key in each step from the actual PDF document directly into the calculator, to be 100% sure that the program was keyable and would run as documented, to avoid wasting the time of interested people in case of typos or errors of any kind, using my time to save yours. Only when everything ran fine did I upload the Article to my site and posted the carefully formatted announcement above. Needless to say, this takes enormous amounts of my time, and tiring my eyesight considerably.


Fact 2: Thanks to Eric Rechlin, my site's administration features includes a full log of how many people visited each day, and how many dowloads there were for any given file. Looking at the logs I've discovered that in the 7 days that have elapsed since I uploaded the 11 files there were only about 2 downloads per file on average, and in particular the Article had 3 downloads in all, all of them within the first few days and none after that.

As of yesterday, this forum had 10,829 members. Assuming that 90% of that figure are lurking/non-active members who never post or download anything, that means that only about 0,3% of the active members were interested in the Article, even if just to see it out of mere curiosity, as clicking on it to display the PDF in a browser tab counts as a download.


The conclusion:

It seems that my assumption that my materials and articles would be of interest to a significant number of forum's members was utterly unfounded, which is entirely my fault.

As such, wasting tons of my scarce free time and eyesight in producing and announcing materials that are of interest to only 0,3% of the people here is nothing but a complete waste of my efforts and I certainly have much more productive and rewarding matters to dedicate my time to, so any future uploads will be made on a severely reduced schedule, if at all, and no further announcements will be posted here, the newly uploaded files will only appear listed in the Latest Additions list at the bottom of my site's Main page.

Thanks for reading and special thanks to those people who were interested.
V.