What has happened to the Homemade in HomemadeTools?

[Jon]

We'll likely gradually tone down the prominent placement of the Tool Talk posts in the newsletter. It launched well and less-and-less needs additional promotion. The videos, text posts, and GIFs have proven their value, and possibly (hard to measure) eliminated a bit of the belief that you can only post a finished tool here. Ozwelder's point about commercial confusion is important. Stuff like the Carter Bandsaw clinic is clearly from a company, but extremely useful, and I don't want people to think that we're subtly advertising for them.

Glad to see that the positive growth here is appreciated! I'm a big fan of the "growth hacking" sites and ideas, and have even written some basic forum software to measure growth metrics. It's amazing some of the tiny things that contribute hugely to growth. Encouraging people to upload an avatar, asking new users "What can we help with?" instead of just "What are you building?". Recently I wrote a basic program that I use every morning to manually record the stated interests of new users. So if someone registers and says that they have a background in heavy equipment, I make a note of it. Then when someone else asks a heavy equipment-related question in the Tools in Progress subforum, I send that first person an email asking if they can help with the question, but only if they've become inactive on the forum. Etc.