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To: <~alpine/users@lists.alpinelinux.org>
Subject: Contributing articles from personal site to wiki?
From: "Unicorn" <unicorn@regrow.earth>
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2022 18:14:35 +0100
Message-Id: <CI1W6WUW9SL5.MCLUNXGMP1P2@unicorn-x220.lan>

Hello everyone,

I have been using Alpine on servers for 1-2 years and on my primary
laptop for a few months now and have run into quite a few instances of
missing newbie-friendly documentation that made me write my own along
the way and publish it to my web/gemini site.

This made me think about Alpine's documentation in general and how to
improve it or make it more accessible, in which the wiki should play a
key role in my opinion. For this reason I was thinking of contributing
contents from my own articles/guides and notes to Alpine's official
wiki to improve the general documentation situation instead of just
having it buried on my site. My site is open source (MIT) and its
contents are licensed with CC-BY-SA 4.0, which is compatible with the
wiki's licensing.

Guides I have written already or have substantial notes on include:
* Detailed beginner's installation walkthrough
* Finding and reading documentation (manpages)
* Basic system hardening (creating user, configuring doas, hardening
sshd, ...)
* Basic awall configuration
* Installing Nextcloud
* Basic WireGuard VPN setup with awall
* UEFI setup with rEFInd
* Installing on encrypted ZFS root

All of these are targeted at newbies or at least people who are new to
Alpine linux and try to assume as little as possible about the readers
previous knowledge. I believe these guides would be great for beginners
to have solid starting points in many directions, which I and others I
have talked to have struggled with while getting into Alpine. There is
very much to love about Alpine, especially since its simplicity makes
it a wonderful tool for learning in theory, but documentation is not
one of its strengths. :)

The reason why I am writing all this here is because I am not sure if
there is interest from Alpine's existing userbase and whether you would
welcome this kind of "here's an article from my site" contribution.
Where wiki pages already exist (eg. Alpine on ZFS), I will of course try
to incorporate my writing with the existing information to prevent more
duplicates or abandoned articles.

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, you can see this article as
an example for a wordy newbie guide I have written:
https://regrow.earth/diy-server/awall.html

Best,
Edin