Main: Help



Welcome to Sentilla Labs!

Our goal is to provide a place for hackers and tinkerers in the pervasive computing community to share their projects with everyone.

Navigating the site

When you first visit our home page, you'll find a list of featured projects. We select these projects in a rather non-scientific fashion, basing our decision on what we think of the projects, as well as from positive user feedback.

If you'd rather see all of the projects currently hosted on the site, use the Browse tab in the navigation bar. This will present you with a list of all projects currently viewable. You can choose to sort them alphabetically, or chronologically based on creation date, or the time that they were last modified.

Tags

When users create projects, they can assign various tags to the projects (because we all know that every community-oriented website these days has to put tags on something).

Searching

If you're trying to find projects related to a particular keyword, try the search box! Just type a few terms in the box, and click the magnifying glass icon magnifying glass and you're off! We'll show you a list of all projects that mention your keyword somewhere in the text. On top of that, we'll search through any code that people have attached to their projects. So if you're trying to find examples of using a certain Sentilla feature, the search box can be a big help!

Joining

So, you've browsed through all of the projects, and you realize that you have an even better idea that you'd like to share with everyone? No problem! Signing up to contribute projects is easy, just click the 'Sign Up!' link in the upper right-hand portion of the page.

Once you've filled out a form with some basic information, you'll receive an email at the address you specified. This email will contain a short agreement that you should read through. If you agree with everything we propose, then just click on the link in your email, and your account will be verified (verifying your email address is an indication that you agree to comply with the terms of service).

Contributing to the Site

Once you've verified the email address associated with your account, you can create a new project. By verifying your email, you'll also acknowledging having read and agreed to the terms of service. They're probably nothing you haven't already seen, but have a look at them just to make sure you agree!

Creating a new project

To start a new project, use the submit tab in the navigation area. You will be presented with a form in which you can enter information about your project. The name of the project should contain numbers and characters only; it will be the URL name for your project, so that it can be accessed at http://labs.sentilla.com/. The title is the friendly name that will show up for the project on the project listing pages. The description is a short (<140 characters) description of your project that will also appear on the listing pages. The abstract will be used to pre-populate the template for your project. Finally, select an avatar to serve as a graphical representation of your project on the listing pages.

After entering this information for your project, click "Create" and you'll be presented with a text editing page. Now you can begin entering the information for your project.

If you ever want to change any of the information associated with your project, use the "Project Settings" link.

Editing your project

When you edit your project, you'll be presented with a simple text editor containing the next for your projects Home page. You can enter anything you want here. Formatting rules are outlined in the help section, which you can view in lieu of the preview by clicking the "Show Help" button, or visiting editing help.

Adding pages to your project

To add a new project to your page, simply create a page link on your projects home page, using the [text][[pagename]] syntax. When you click on the link, you'll be presented with a new page which you can edit in the same way as the home page. If you later delete the reference to your page, don't worry, all pages for your project will show up in a list on the sidebar.