Hey if any of you all get a hankering to do an article for the Japan Rail Modelers of Washington DC web site (
http://japanrailmodelers.org) on your own layouts, projects, techniques, reviews, tips and tricks, etc, we would love to have them. the JRM website comes up a lot in folks initial searches for japanese train modeling (along with JNS here) and as part of our club mission we try to 'get the word out' and get new folks into the hobby. As such i have worked on trying to expand the website to be a repository of layouts, clubs, reviews and such in a more structured reference site for folks wandering in to see some presentations of what can be done and folks experiences doing the work.
there are a number of blogs and forums out there and they are wonderful resources its just that many times the content gets jumbled and buried fast and can be unearthed if you know what you are looking for but newbies usually dont and can get confused or daunted doing the digging. so the jrm website hopefully will be nice mini presentations that are easy for newbies (and oldies) to access for reference. forums are great for discussion and sharing ideas, but not so great at reference as things get spread out, sometimes threads split, same topic in three different places with different bits discussed. JNS wiki was created to do more organizing of content reference material, but never really took off for the modeling stuff.
I have a simple system to create and update photo albums as well so an article can have several pictures with the text (or more if needed for the article, its up to you) and can also have a larger block of images in a linked photo gallery. having lots of additional photos for folks to look at is always great stimulation to get them going!
Dont mean this to compete with JNS, but to compliment it and perhaps be a bit of an archive for good bits of content. JRM does not want to get into the forum/discussion/social networking area at all, but more just the reference and starting point site to show the variety of ways folks go about japanese rail modeling and that folks are doing it all over the world!
so just contact me if you are interested in doing something. they can be simple How to articles, a review of an interesting product (please keep them civil and no digressing into manufacturer wars), layout articles, mini project articles, cool tools, interesting tips or scenery techniques, club writeups, etc. These dont have to be new yorker articles, many times just a few paragraphs with a few photos with captions does the trick! I know many of us have written the basic stuff in our discussions here so the rough copy is already laying around (i know i intend to find some of mine and dress them up into an article!)
Also a fun way to show others what you are doing. one of the former jrm members just put his layout up on the site and then was able to share it with his non train friends and they really got a kick out of it!
Happy to put links back to your own sites, blogs etc as well with the article as i see this is the best way to put links in for folks as they get an intro to you and what there maybe more of lurking off behind that link. makes for a lot stronger link in the users mind as well.
thanks, hope to hear from folks!
cheers
jeff
