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While thinking about promoting our site and attracting more users, I was looking for the hottest topic with highest possible impact.

We can see that TikZ is the hottest topic on the site. So it's promising to choose this topic for promoting tex.stackexchange.com for attracting users and search engines.

Let's use a search engine to find the best possible partner: www.google.com/search?q=tikz gives me results in this order, check yourself:

  1. TikZ and PGF | TeXample.net on TeXample.net
  2. TikZ and PGF examples on TeXample.net
  3. PGF/TikZ - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on Wikipedia
  4. PGF and TikZ -- Graphic systems for TeX on SourceForge

So I think, TeXample.net is the best possible partner for a cooperation. Regarding this topic, it ranks higher than Wikipedia, higher than the TikZ SourceForge project site, and also higher than CTAN which appears on the 8th place.

Therefore I suggest, StackExchange and specifically tex.stackexchange.com may start a cooperation with TeXample.net. TeXample.net is a non-profit community site. For full disclosure, I have been maintaining this site since December last year. Currently 122 authors have contributed TikZ code to this site.

What you you think about that? If you like the idea, it would be great if you upvote this question, showing your support.

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  • 2
    Of course, one of the reasons TikZ questions are so common is that people want to draw lots of 'stuff', and that is tricky. (Indeed, many examples might be fairly answered with 'use a graphical tool, it is a drawing').
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Feb 4, 2012 at 16:33
  • 1
    @JosephWright Sounds like 'use a word processor, it's text' for writing which I guess we would not say. ;-)
    – Stefan Kottwitz Mod
    Commented Feb 4, 2012 at 16:38
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    Not the same thing. (La)TeX is about text: TikZ is really a front end for PostScript or PDF graphics commands, not actually for TeX in the main. My point is that I feel that there are places where we should recommend a tool outside of the TeX 'ecosystem'. For example, I'm pretty clear that drawing chemical structures is still best done using ChemDraw, as any code-based approach simply does not cut it.
    – Joseph Wright Mod
    Commented Feb 4, 2012 at 16:44
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    I think this would at least depend on what their hosting fee is. :) But, it looks like there's support for the idea here, so we can talk about some sort of partnership and see if anything can be worked out. Have you approached TeXample.net at all? Shoot an email to [email protected] when you're ready to discuss it with us.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Feb 14, 2012 at 5:54

4 Answers 4

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What can TeXample.net do for TeX Stack Exchange?

  • A banner on the main page and on the TikZ page, meaning: if you have questions about TikZ, go to TeX Stack Exchange to get an answer.
  • The TeXample TikZ gallery collects examples from TeX.SE and links prominently here.
  • The TeXample site lists TikZ question snippets from TeX.SE, via a tag feed collector, driving TikZ users to TeX Stack Exchange. A preview of this is implemented, with a set of older questions:
  • The Community Aggregator shows the TeX Stack Exchange blog entries.
  • The Weblog would write about this partnership and could further report about topics on TeX Stack Exchange.
  • TeXample.net started with Twitter. Just 29 tweets, and already more than 200 followers, continually growing. It already tweeted about TikZ on TeX Stack Exchange, and it could do again.
  • TeXblog.net will possibly migrate to the same server. It has frequently written about TeX Stack Exchange and would continue doing that. It's not by accident that I got 9 Publicist badges for more than 1000 unique views, 16 Booster and 48 Announcer badges, I just tell you that to explain that we could outreach.

Further suggestions are welcome.

What could Stack Exchange do for TeXample.net?

  • Stack Exchange could sponsor the hosting fee of the web server.
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    I think the most important advantage of TeXample is that it has proper sub categories for TikZ. TeX SE has lots of brilliant answers, but it lacks the structure to look them up. For some reason the tag mechanism doesn't work.
    – user10274
    Commented Feb 17, 2012 at 22:45
  • I added a link to TeXample in the tikz-pgf tag.
    – N.N.
    Commented Feb 19, 2012 at 12:19
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I support your idea entirely and would suggest that TeXample.net remains as a repository of excellent graphic designs by TikZ and centralize the questions only to tex.stackexchange.com by probably placing a link on each example provide back to this site. Probably the logo for tex.stackexchange.com would suffice. I may even add a login on TeXample.net for stackexchange users so that if they have a question on anything they use, the can just be redirected here in the Ask a question section. Likewise, I would greatly want to see the applications of TikZ from this website being shared more often in TeXample.net. For example, in one of my last questions Sieve of Eratosthenes in tikz many users provided excellent mastery of TikZ. Its really amazing. Of course these are just suggestions.

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Maybe you could integrate http://github.com as well to provide a place for all the wonderful tikz-enhancements nobody finds in the www. That's what the folks of jquery planned to do with their plugin site, see http://blog.jquery.com/2011/12/08/what-is-happening-to-the-jquery-plugins-site/ .

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What can TeXample.net do for TeX Stack Exchange and Vice Versa? -> tags/categories mapping between pages

TeXample.net has very nice categorisation :

http://texample.net/tikz/examples/

I think that subcategories can link to TeX.SE tags sets to show questions related with given subtopic (I assume that each subcategory can be referenced to intersection of TeX.SE tags).

While browsing related tags on TeX.SE site could recommend subcategories on TeXample.net.

On both pages suggestions can be put:

  • on top - if implementation of one-three links is possible
  • on side - if implementation of mapping one-to-many is the only choice

I would suggest to try to create mapping for each site with mapping one-to-{one...three} sites.

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