Two days old today

Yesterday was the site's first full day of operation and there were more than 200 visitors and over 1,000 pages served. I feel pretty happy about that. I expect that the numbers will dip down again when the novelty wears off, but hopefully many people picked up the Atom feed for the new recipes, but if you're grabbing a feed now then try the one that includes the blog entries.

I had a very nice chat with Matias last night on IRC. Matias is deeply involved in the Improve Boost Docs project (IBD for short). BTW, you can find both of us on irc://freenode/ibd quite a lot of the time if you want to chat. I use the nic kayess.

The IBD project is a really great idea. All developers understand that documentation is a Sisyphean task. They're never finished and they're never good enough. The problem that IBD has been having is that participation has been low. Partly this is because, by its nature, IBD needs to be quite structured in order to work. What none of us want is to distract the library authors from producing more great work for us to use.

What both Matias and I hope is that this cookbook site can help more people to participate by feeding examples, code snippets and short bits of documentation into the official library documentation. I hope that the barriers to participation are lower here and that means more people will get involved.

So, if you are a Boost user please do at least one of these:

1. Grab the recipe feed in your news reader. Better yet, grab the site feed which also includes the blog entries (there will be a feed that will also include the forum posts later).
2. Feel free to register and post requests for recipes on the forums associated with the libraries, post comments about the recipes already there and better yet post recipes. If you're learning a Boost library then the code you get working is especially valuable as it's likely that others are going down the same path as you.
3. If you post code snippets on your web site or on the Boost users list then please add them here too. If you come across useful code snippets please ask the author to post them here.

If you use Boost I think you love the hard work that the library writers have put in. This site is your chance to give something back, even if it's just a post telling us what you find difficult so we can try to get it explained better — with a recipe you can use.