Bicycle Maintenance for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCXLII

Construction of a bicycle chain

It's no longer surprising to our staffers that the old adage, "Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" has never been truer than in the age of internet content farms. Really: if you're not familiar enough with a mechanical or technological problem to ask a cogent, on-point question; you sure as heck shouldn't expect some self-appointed generalist with an English Lit degree to both understand your question and answer it. Capisce? Well, some poor schmuck asked DoItYourself.com "How to Repair Squeaky Bike Tires," and one of their English grads, Nora Zavalczki, pretended to answer it. Nora's ignorance of all things bicycle, however, was pretty obvious.

Batter Boards for Dummies, Redux - The Freelance Files MMCXXXVI

squaring a layout

Unlike a lot of freelancers out there, our staff does due diligence in researching the topics "covered" (and we use the term loosely) by our nominees. Whether we feel expert or not, we research the topics to see if, perhaps, a freelancer stumbled over an alternative, yet still acceptable, method for how-to posts. When we were looking for possible sources of the misinformation in yesterday's post about batter boards, we found similarly clueless twaddle at another content farm (which predates the work of Nichole Liandi). Let's have a look at how Colleen McKie also got it wrong in her DoItYourself.com post, "How to Build Batter Boards" without, we might add, any improvement from "review" by Gabriel Connor Salter.

Garage Door Headers for Dummies

Temporary wall

Over the years we've often seen references to a site calling itself DoItYourself.com, but have spent precious little time actually browsing there. That all ended not long ago when we found some clueless English major from eHow.com who cited one of the posts in a how-to article about plumbing, a post that – to be frank – was the equal of anything we ever saw at eHow for utter bullshit. We entered a single search term, "headers," and back came a chunk of unmitigated garbage called "How to Replace a Garage Door Header" by someone calling herself Jen S.