Help us revise our beginner's guide to hammocking!

[Ratdog]

Is this a student project?
Or is this a revenue generating personal blog?
Or is this a commercial blog?

Curious as to the target audience, aside from the generic 'newbies'.

Write what you know, your journey. Limited though it may be, others will benefit from your experience.
Trying to write as an expert won't make it until you log the time to gain the wisdom, no matter how many folks try to contribute ideas.

Keeping it simple, having a focus, will make a world of difference. Stay away from the history of hammocks unless you're prepared to dig a little deeper. Each paragraph should have a few central points that could literally be bullets, I'm not getting that so far.

Appreciate your efforts, never can have too many primers but the devil is in the details and nuance matters. Example, you can read all you want and watch as many videos you want on lacing in a heel lock on your hiking boots but if they forget to tell you to only pull the laces towards the toes when tightening, they've missed a key component and wasted their time and yours creating said video or writeup. So I'd be inclined to either edit your complete writeup in exhaustive detail ensuring that critical points are covered or again, encourage you to describe your journey. Editing en masse yields cumbersome regurgitation rather than elegant wordsmithing.

[sidneyhornblower]

Very good advice from ratdog, bubba and others. I'd echo the advice to skip hammock history, unless you're going to start with Ed Speer and others who helped pioneer camping in hammocks. I'm using Speer only because he wrote a book about it, not to denigrate the efforts of others. A little bit of hammock camping history may be relevant, but only as an intro to current practice. Good luck.

[Kroma]

Actually you could've saved a lot of typing and effort by just making your blog entry one hyperlink:

http://theultimatehang.com/

exactly this. I'd also add hammockforums.net right after that. so maybe 2 links.

[Kroma]

If you ever find yourself lost in the wilderness, the eye-catching colors of a hammock make for an excellent flag to signal emergency rescue crews. The large surface area allows the hammock to catch the wind and let's you fly a flag that is highly visible for miles around.

I think you should add something about the ability to make a hot air balloon.

[mountainhanger]

Actually you could've saved a lot of typing and effort by just making your blog entry one hyperlink:

http://theultimatehang.com/

Agreed. Can't be beat

[wilsonlin45]

Is this a student project?
Or is this a revenue generating personal blog?
Or is this a commercial blog?

Curious as to the target audience, aside from the generic 'newbies'.

Write what you know, your journey. Limited though it may be, others will benefit from your experience.
Trying to write as an expert won't make it until you log the time to gain the wisdom, no matter how many folks try to contribute ideas.

Keeping it simple, having a focus, will make a world of difference. Stay away from the history of hammocks unless you're prepared to dig a little deeper. Each paragraph should have a few central points that could literally be bullets, I'm not getting that so far.

Appreciate your efforts, never can have too many primers but the devil is in the details and nuance matters. Example, you can read all you want and watch as many videos you want on lacing in a heel lock on your hiking boots but if they forget to tell you to only pull the laces towards the toes when tightening, they've missed a key component and wasted their time and yours creating said video or writeup. So I'd be inclined to either edit your complete writeup in exhaustive detail ensuring that critical points are covered or again, encourage you to describe your journey. Editing en masse yields cumbersome regurgitation rather than elegant wordsmithing.

This is a commercial blog. Our audience consists of campers, and people looking to learn about hammocks.
What I had originally was the journey of me and my partner and our combined experience. I reached out to the forum to fact check and see if there were any glaring mistakes (which there were!)
I'm working on making the article much more concise and to the point. Thanks!

[Liberty Guy]

Besides all the good content changes and addition suggestions from my fellow hangers, I also think you need to pay close attention to readability.
Make it easy to read, not two many lines per paragraph. use bullets to hit key points. Add pictures between sections. A good example of writing style would be look and any political direct mail letter, they are written to make the reader want to continue reading from page to page.

An OK content piece laid out well will be more helpful to a newbie than a great content piece that is hard to read.

In direct mail there is a saying:

Non word - words
Non sentence - sentences
Non paragraph - paragraphs

The point is write the piece like you are actually talking, not writing an english paper.

[Packrat69]

In the insulation section you might want to mention using reflectix ( car window shade) as a bottom insulating layer.😊

[cougarmeat]

Definitely google Ridge Runner or other bridge hammocks. They are not your "Mayan" hammock, they offer more visibility - ability to see around you - than a gathered end, and are darned comfortable. That said, they do require trees further apart so can be a little more difficult to "site".