[Paul] wrote in to tell us about his brand new hack hosting service, HackHut. Based on WordPress with some modifications, it is definitely worth keeping an eye on as new features emerge.

Instructabliss

Speaking of project hosting, Instructables are a common source of projects as well as complaints. Instructabliss by [Daid] is an often mentioned solution in our comments, and we thought we would bring it up so commenters don’t have to. We understand why it was made and think it was a clever hack, but we don’t officially endorse it. We survive on Ad revenue, if someone were doing this to us, it would hurt. We’re also not sure about the legalities of such a service, so keep us updated.

Grass Burning Robot

[Sebastian] brings us his grass burning, flame throwing robot. This robot takes in SVG files to create its burn path, and burns away. Not too many details, but be sure to check out the photos on his site.

[via Make]

Ok, you’ve finished your project, you’ve taken great notes along the way and photographed every step. Now you want to share. Where will you post it? There are a lot of options out there, private hosting, Hackaday,  instructables, and tons of others. How can you decide? Here are some handy break downs to help you figure it out at a glance.

Each has its own pros and cons. Take a peek at our list after the break and share your own as well.

1. Send it to Hackaday.com
What? Hackaday will host my project? Yes, possibly. We won’t host everything, but we really do like to host cool stuff. As far as we’re concerned, it isn’t much different from linking to your project on another site.  We still write an article, we still give you full credit, you just don’t have to put it up elsewhere.

Pros: Tons of readers. Free.
Cons: Not a system where you can log in and edit. You send to us, if it is cool, we post it.

2. Instructables.com
This is a very common option. It is easy to set up, quite popular, well promoted. However, we see complaints about it daily due to the cons.

Pros: Huge reader base already there. Tools to make documenting easier. Free.
Cons: The advertisements are overpowering sometimes. People have to log in to view all of your photos.

3.Your own private site.
Absolute control.

Pros: You have full control of the look, feel, and behavior.
Cons: This can cost a little money for hosting and be time-consuming. It isn’t that fun if you hate web design either.

4. A forum.

This is a pretty common one. It can be nice to follow along as a project develops but popular ones can string out over many pages. It can get tiring trying to dig the important information out of a popular forum thread.

Pros: You have full control of the content.
Cons: not a great layout for following a project. People might need to log in to see it.

Our Suggestion:

Your own personal site. Sure, it can be a pain to set one up and get hosting. Ultimately though, you have the most control of your content. With Fantastico becoming more common on hosts, you may not even have to learn any html. Just pay your hosting fee, log in and push a button and you have wordress or joomla or drupal installed.

Tell us what other places you host your projects and why you would choose them. Would anyone like a basic tutorial on setting up a simple site to host your own project?

[Aaron] has been working at iweb hosting for about 5 years. When he started, the number of servers was small enough that managing them was fairly painless and could be done by just manually verifying that everything was operational. As the number of servers grew, this task became more and more difficult. They employed various methods of tracking problems, but found them all lacking in one way or another. They got an idea to build a Defcon status page based on all of the information collected about their server status. The page was built and all rejoiced. As with most projects, they just couldn’t leave it alone. Next, they built an android app to be able to see the defcon status from their phones. As cool as that was, they felt they needed to have yet another way to keep track. They What you see above is the prototype for the office defcon status display. It is extremely simple, using an Arduino (yes, we know, massive overkill) to receive status updates to change the display number. [Aaron] says that right now it is a mess, and you have to shield it from the light with your hands to see it, but it works. What should the next step be? A giant Alpha Numeric LED indicator? A nixie tube?

[photo: nrkbeta]