Your own tutorials

Some general info

You can write a tutorial for PostGIS online yourself and publish it on your own site. Then you just point to your tutorial in the url to postgisonline, like this:
http://www.postgisonline.org/map.php?tutorial=http://www.mycoolsite.info/mytutorial.html

Then you can put that link on your site and you will get the statistics from how many using your tutorial and so on. You can also send the link to your tutorial to me and I can list it on the tutorial page of this site. You can also send the whole tutorial page to me and I can put it on the server if you don't want it on your own server.

How to write them

First I have to admit that the format of the tutorials today is not good at all. That doesn't affect the user of the tutorial but it makes it worse to write them. It should be in XML format instead, but I can guarantee that tutorials written this way will work even when the format is reformed.

To get started download this template. You will have to download it to your computor and open it in a texteditor. The tutorials I think, need to have a known ending like .html to not get problems in some browsers.

Well, in the file I think you see how it works. Every page is built by four elements.

• A textarea holding the tutorial text. That shall have the id "text" and the page number for example id="text4"
• A textarea holding the sql code. That shall have the id "sql" and the page number for example id="sql4"
• A input tag with id background and pagenumber for example id="background4" tha value of the input element shall be one of the alternatives in the background dropdown. I you don't want any background map you should put an emty string as value. Because otherwise any old picture will still be there. Remember the user can come to each page from any page by jumping to the pagenumber.
• A input tag with id img and pagenumber for example id="img4" tha value of the input element shall be a link to an image. f you don't want any image you should set the value to value = "images/empty.gif" by the same reason as the background map above.

In the template file is also an description how to write code blocks.

You are of course free to write your tutorial just like you want, but I think we will gain some if the users recognisse what it looks like with a presentation page first and a content page right after.

If you want to see more of how other tutorials are written you can download them the same way as the template. They are in the same directory so you find them like:
http://postgisonline.org/tutorials/simple_sql1.html
and so on.

If you have suggestions how to develop this tutorial thing please send a message on the address below