The Handmade Network provides a place for project owners such as yourself to showcase and record the development of their projects, and for users to discover, follow and discuss these projects. This Monthly Update Policy applies to your project if it doesn’t fit into a category listed under “When the Monthly Update Policy Doesn’t Apply” below, and is intended to encourage development and guard against your active or complete project having to share web space with abandoned ones.
Outlined are the ways a project owner, or a well-meaning member of the project’s community, may contribute to a monthly update. Note that updates must be made once per calendar month, by the last day of the month — not one month since the last update.
The most straightforward way to update the community with your progress is with a simple blog post within the network. The length of the post is not measured, as the network understands an individual may have difficult months. Therefore, anything in the spectrum of a quick message saying you had no progress, to a summary of a chat discussion, all the way up to a full-blown detailed development log would be considered a monthly update. Even with posts detailing your inability to work for a month, looking back at your own development history is an important exercise.
Any activity in your project’s forum would satisfy the monthly update policy. This includes contributions to any forum discussions from you as the project owner and from members of the community.
YouTube videos, GitHub / GitLab repository links (e.g. to a recent commit), Reddit thread, Twitter threads discussing the project’s current state, your own personal blog posts, are a few examples of what would work here. Such updates must be linked somewhere in your project page, blog, or forums in order to qualify. As a reminder, having a hyperlink in to your external blog in your signature or profile links that visitors are expected to follow up on without further prompting from you doesn’t count.
New projects are not required to provide updates until the month following their approval. For example, if a project is posted in the middle of March, they are not required to post any further updates for March – the monthly update policy will go in effect for that project in April.
If the developer foresees not being able to provide a timely update this month, or possibly even for a number of consecutive months, we invite them to post a short update on their project blog letting their audience know they’ll be taking a leave of absence. A reason need not be supplied. Should you feel uncomfortable in doing so, an email to [email protected] in private will let us flag the project as in hiatus and it will let us deflect incoming questions about the project’s status in your stead.
Although a blog post explaining the leave of absence will suffice, such an e-mail is still appreciated, of course.
When the project owner is confident the project has entered a stage of completion, a stage of maintenance with no further features, or it has changed identity such that it is no longer considered the original project, the monthly update would no longer be necessary. Please advise us of this so that we may update the status of your project, both for our bookkeeping, and for the purposes of sorting projects by status.
If for any month there was no activity, without having notified the network, the project owner will receive an e-mail within the first week of the following month. No further action will be taken for that month.
If for any subsequent month there is no activity, without having notified the network, the project will receive an e-mail within the first week of the following month and will be flagged as ‘in-hiatus’ until activity resumes. This will always happen for any inactive month following the first strike of the year. At the start of a new year, the strikes are reset, applying the first one first.
The project, while in hiatus, will remain as part of the project listings but may be pushed down the list, and may not be considered as a featured project while in this status. If it was a featured project at the time of being flagged due to a strike, it will be removed from the featured list.
If the project has been in hiatus for three months, without having notified the network, it is considered dead and removed from the project listings. E-mail [email protected] to re-instate it the first time this occurs.
The second time a project reaches this status, without having notified the network, it will be considered permanently dead. At this point, the project will need to be re-submitted.
More active projects have a better chance at being noticed by members and staff alike. Popular projects are more likely to receive votes towards a monthly community featured-project slot, though community interest can be piqued even by small or new projects if the project is producing interesting content. Community-chosen featured-project slots make up to 3 of the possible highlighted projects -- there are also up to 3 staff-pick featured slots each month. The recipients of these slots are at the discretion of the site staff, but you can make your project shine by frequently and consistently reporting progress on your project and interacting with the community.