The Birth of a Handbook
Study Hacks readers often complain that it’s hard to navigate the 300 articles and 1500 comments that populate this blog. The categories and search box help, but for a new reader, wading though the archives can still be intimidating.
Here’s my solution: yesterday I launched a wiki that I’m calling The Study Hacks Student Handbook. I hope to evolve this wiki into a detailed guide to the content of the Study Hacks blog — a resource to organize and make sense of all the advice and systems and philosophies that crowd our little corner of the online universe.
Here’s the thing: I need your help to build and maintain this online guide. If you’re a Study Hacks fan, and want to help your fellow students live better student lives, then send me an e-mail, and I’ll set you up with your own editor account for the wiki — allowing you to update and edit the site as you see fit.
Once the Student Handbook gets to a reasonable size, I’ll start promoting it on the blog. I want to make this one of the web’s most important student resources.
To get there, however, I need your help!
Cal,
The Wiki is a good idea, but one thing that you should consider is a simpler archive page, like Steve Pavlina’s:
https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/archives/
Or mine:
https://www.rationalwealth.net/blog/archives/
By just having the titles and the dates, it makes it very easy to quickly scan through the articles. Your current archive system is a little cumbersome.
Just a thought.
By the way, I love your blog.
This is unrelated, but what study habits would you recommend for a student beginning a foreign language (such as Russian)?
I’ll see if there is a word-press plug-in that can handle that for me.
see:
https://calnewport.com/blog/2008/01/11/crowd-widsdom-how-study-hacks-readers-suggest-you-study-foreign-languages/
This sounds like a good idea. I’ve sent you an e-mail.
C’mon Cal, you’re killing me. Help a brother out and host the wiki on PBwiki.
You have to understand my situation. A couple days ago I ran out of bandwidth on my hosting account, so I was forced to upgrade. As part of the upgrade, I was given unlimited SQL databases. So here I am, browsing through all the different features I can now install on my domain, and I’m telling you, for a computer science guy, it was like being a kid in the world’s largest candy store. So exciting. I had to install something! Just because I could.
For the record: PBwiki is much better and I have three different personal accounts hosted there. 🙂
Two things:
First, some fanmail–my senior year is going great. I’m getting time to go to Philadelphia and NYC on the weekends, and my schoolwork is coming along great. I’ve put aside three to four hours away every day in the morning to write my thesis, and I actually GET SOME SLEEP now. I also cut back on my activities, and life is much less stressful. Thanks!
Second, I can help a little with your wiki…let me know what commitment you want by e-mail, I can’t promise too much time but I would be glad to help.