Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

With over 1300 posts on this weblog, it’s easy to get lost. Maybe you stumbled onto one of the posts after a web search, and then kept reading. Some people told me they just started reading it all from end to finish (gulp!).

It’s not always easy to follow the brain dump of a quirky Franco-Dutch maverick :)

Let me start by listing the resources related to all this JeeStuff:

• This daily weblog is my train-of-thought, year-in, year-out. Some projects get started and never end (low-power tweaking?), others get started and never get finished (sad, but true), yet others are me going off on some tangent, and finally there are the occasional series and mini-series – diving a bit deeper into some topic, or trying to explain something (electronics, usually).
• There’s a chronological index, which I update from time to time using a little script. It lists just the titles and the tags. It’s a quick way to see what sort of topics get covered.
• Most post are tagged, see the “tag cloud” at the bottom of each page. Clicking on a term leads to the corresponding posts, as one (large) page. This is probably a good way to read about certain topics when you come to this web site for the first time.
• At the bottom of each weblog page is a list of posts, grouped by month. Frankly, I don’t think it’s that useful – it’s mostly there because WordPress makes it easy to add.
• And there’s the search field, again at the bottom of each page. It works quite well, but if your search term is too vague, you’ll get a page with a huge list of weblog posts.

Apart from this weblog, which is at jeelabs.org, there is also the community site at jeelabs.net, and the shop at jeelabs.com. It’s a bit unfortunate that they all look different, and that they all use different software packages, but that’s the way it is.

The community site contains a number of areas:

• The café is a publik wiki, with reference materials, projects, and pointers to other related pages and sites. Note that although it’s a wiki, it is not open for editing without signing up – that’s just to keep out spammers. Everyone is welcome, cordially invited even, to participate.

• The software I write – with the help and contributions of others – ends up on GitHub so that anyone can browse the code, see what is being added / changed / fixed over time, and also create a fork to hack on. My code tends to be MIT-licensed wherever possible, so it’s all yours to look at, learn from, re-use, whatever.

• There is documentation at jeelabs.net/pub/docs/ for several of the more important packages and libraries on GitHub. Updating is a manual step here, so it can lag, occasionally. These pages are generated by Doxygen.

• The hardware area lists all the products which have escaped from JeeLabs, and are ending up all over the world. It’s a reference area, which should be the final word on what each product is and isn’t.

• There are several forums for discussion, making suggestions, asking questions, and posting notes about anything somehow related (or at least relevant) to JeeLabs.

• For real-time discussion, there’s a #jeelabs IRC channel, though I rarely leave my IRC client running very long. Doesn’t seem to be used much, but it’s there to be used.

If you’re new to electronics, you could go through the series called Easy electrons. For a write-up about setting up a sensor network at home, see the Dive Into JeeNodes series.

What else? Let me know, please. I find it very hard to get in the mindset of someone reaching this site for the first time. If you are lost, chances are that others will be too – so any tips and suggestions on how to improve this site for new visitors would be a big help.

You can always reach me via the info listed on the “About” page.