Bracing A Fence Corner for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCLI

T-Post Corner Brace

We don't know about you, but we hear an awful lot these days about the differences between people who live in rural settings and those who live in the big cities. While we think most of the difference is rubbish, there definitely are some things that people who grew up in or now live in rural settings know that lifelog city-dwellers don't. Based on what he wrote in "How to Make a Corner Fence With T-Posts" for HomeSteady.com, we somehow suspect that Keith Allen was a city boy (his North Dakota roots notwithstanding). We ran across his work while looking at a garbage post penned by one Jack Gerard/Jack Casteele about stretching barbed wire.

PVC Gazebo Plans for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCL

Should've stuck with a canopy, Jane

 Let's say you actually did want to build a gazebo out of PVC pipe: either you'd already be fairly familiar with using PVC or you would need a lot of help. Help? you know, information on how PVC fittings work and how to choose the correct fittings; information about the structural strength of PVC; tips on the size of the PVC pipes needed to build a sturdy structure that wouldn't look spindly... You'd certainly need more information than "just stick some poles in the ground and shove a commercial 'gazebo cover' over them." That model, however, is precisely what eHow.com's "Jane Smith" wrote in the HomeSteady.com post, "How to Make a PVC Gazebo." Yeah, sure...

Tall Fences for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCVI

rails, eight-foot fence

A (not) surprising number of the freelancers who pounded out post after post at content farms like eHow.com and HubPages.com liked to pretend that they possessed vast experience in the topics they covered. Take eHow's Denise Sullivan, who "after a long career in business" claimed expertise in "business, law, gaming, home renovations, gardening, sports and exercise." No kidding: every one of those areas! If, however, her expertise in law matches the level of knowledge displayed in the HomeSteady.com post "How to Build an 8-Foot Wood Fence," people who've followed her "advice" just might be in jail...

An ATA Road Case for Dummies

extruded aluminum edging

Right up front, we'll admit that we'd never heard the phrase "ATA Road Case" before reading through today's nominee. We'd never heard of one, but we had used one... If you aren't familiar with the product, no worries: it's a shipping container that meets the protection standards of the American Transportation Association (ATA), and we've used one in the past to ship electronics while flying. It's possible (although unlikely) that eHow.com's Jeff O'Kelley, who claims to be a photographer, has used one... but it's for darned certain that he never built one. That makes him an unlikely candidate to write "How to Build an ATA Road Case"¹ for OurPastimes.com.

Bed Frame to Porch Swing for Dummies

Bed frame to porch swing

The intersection of "upcycling" and the website Pinterest.com seems to have been responsible for an awful lot of dumbassery in the world of (alleged) DIY freelancing. Someone saw a photo on Pinterest of, say, an old bed frame repurposed into a porch swing and thought, "How cute! I wanna do that!" Instead of finding the original of the photo, said person just googled "How to Make an Old Bed Frame Into a Porch Swing." An eHow.com scraper 'bot grabbed the search terms to create a "title"; and Kimberly Dyke thought to herself, "Gee: I can write that." Unfortunately she couldn't, as her HomeSteady.com post clearly proved.

Windmill Plans, the Dummies Version

windmill turbine

Excuse us if we seem to be pedantic about it, but we're of the opinion that if you ask someone for plans to do something, you expect to get... well, you expect to get plans in return. More to the point, if the person you asked doesn't know how to perform whatever task you're researching, we would greatly prefer that they say so. That was, sadly, rarely the case at eHow.com, where a stable of freelance contributors regularly pounded out bushwa to collect their stipend. We're thinking of contributors like Nida Rasheed, whose "Plans to Build a Windmill" at Sciencing.com are a classic example.

Split Rail Fences For (and By) Dummies

This is what the fence looks like

The internet was a wild and woolly place during the recession of 2008-09, filled with people who were desperate for whatever cash they could generate at pay-per-click sites and the like. You could generate a tidy income at eHow.com in those days  for pounding out a dozen or so 300-word posts allegedly about how to do something that you looked up on the internet, just because some poor sucker typed the question into a search engine. Ideally, the person writing the how-to would know... well, how to do it. The problem at eHow? Too often the writers didn't know what they were talking about. That's when you ended up with rubbish like Rebecca Boardman wrote to explain "How to Install a Split Rail Fence,"¹ now at HomeSteady.com.

Fence Posts for Dummies

Fence post up against house

It may be just us, but freelancers whose income is based on the MSU¹ method just plain bug the bejeepers out of us. The worst are the ones who pretend that they have an answer to your question, but are just talking through their hats. Today, we feature some poor schmuck who wanted to know "How to Attach a Wood Fence to a House" and the completely crapalicious answer that eHowian Lisa Wampler gave him, an answer now enshrined at Hunker.com. Hunker, indeed...

Counters Without Cabinets, a Dummy Speaks

How about a pipe shelf, Sal?

Sometimes all one of our staffers needs to nominate an online post for our daily award is a single sentence. Maybe the rest of the content is OK (or at least acceptable), but that one line is enough to trip the bullcrap detector or, as is the case today, cause unending mirth. So without further ado, let's see just what it is that had our staffer ROFL when she read the Sal Marco post "How to Support a Countertop in a Laundry Room" at HomeSteady.com.

A PVC Sandpoint for Dummies

sandpoint well

We've noticed on many occasion that the self-appointed contributors to eHow (their contributions now moved to Leaf Group's family of niche sites) simply didn't get the point of the questions they were pretending to answer. Some of the more clueless among them not only missed the point, but got the point that they did address basically wrong. That's what happened with today's nominee, returning DotD¹ Alexander Callos, and his HomeSteady.com post "How to Make a Sand Point out of PVC."

Kennels for Dummies

A kennel is a large doghouse for multiple dogs, isn't it?

We had a string of DotDs recently who had all decided that they were allowed to define a critical term however would make it easiest to fake their way through a set of how-to instructions. Now that we look more closely at the syndrome, it appears that many of the contributors at the former eHow.com were guilty of that crime against knowledge, contributors like the cutely named DillonWackerman¹ whose "How to Build a Large Doghouse for Multiple Dogs" can now be found at Cuteness.com (fittingly...).

Wire Mesh Fences for Dummies

Stretching a fence

The Antisocial Network staffers who patrol the web looking for likely DotD candidates come across some pretty silly notions on a regular basis. A lot of them stem from the freelancers' lack of even the basics of the topic they've chosen to cover, a situation that leads to often hilarious prose. Take, for instance, an article at HomeSteady.com called "How to Stretch Wire Mesh Fence," originally posted to eHow.com by returning DotD Louie Doverspike.

PVC Driveway Decorations for Dummies

driveway arch

We've been following the Leaf Group rewrite team from afar, often giggling at the antics of some of its members. While a few of them actually do some research to correct errors and gross stupidity, others merely assume that what was already written was correct; just rewording a bit and adding some extraneous bushwa to make the article longer. Today's nominee, Nicole or Nicky LaMarco is a prime example. Have a look at her stellar rewrite of the HomeSteady.com topic, "How to Build an Archway Over the Driveway From PVC." Tsk. Tsk.

A-Frames for Dummy Swing Builders

Lets' see you cut this with a miter box!

Little, if anything, sparks greater joy among a couple of our search team members than finding some former high-school "journalist" and creative writing grad trying to describe DIY carpentry projects. It happens with amazing frequency in the former eHow.com niches, where much of the content bears little resemblance to useful instructions. In today's DotD nomination, we see how eHowian Joanne Robitaille made a mess of "How to Build an A-Frame Swing Set." We went back to the original at eHow to see all the goodies Leaf Group managed to omit when they migrated it from eHow.com to Hunker.com.

Installing Fence Panels for Dummies

Stepped fence panels

When the time comes to build a fence around your property, whether it's to keep dogs and kids inside or keep nosy neighbors outside, you have to make a choice: do you build the fence picket by picket, or do you buy those hand-dandy pre-assembled fence panels from your local big-box store? Our in-house landscaper types have done both. If the truth be told, they'd rather build everything from scratch because it give you a lot more flexibility. If, however, you decide to go with panels, we strongly advise you to look for help somewhere other than Mike Andrew and his HomeSteady.com post, "How to Mount Wood Fence Panels Between Posts."

Pumps for a Dummy Pond Owner

A small backyard pond

Unlike some websites, we routinely check our content for dead links (each page is checked about once every three months). In the process, our staffers sometimes come across a freelancer whose name they haven't seen lately, someone whose qualifications are so sterling as to demand that we search their body of work for more nominations. That's what happened today: we ran across eHow's Jan Goldfield, already a DotD in two categories. What the heck? Let's make it three, with the SFGate.com post "How to Calculate a Pond Pump's Electricity Cost."

Sloping Privacy Fences for Dummies

That's not a pre-assembled panel, Edwin.

Many of the freelancers we run across in our research seem to suffer from a version of tunnel vision. This seems to be especially true of eHow.com posts, most of which are now in the Leaf Group family of niches. Perhaps the freelancer has a brief experience with the topic, more likely the freelancer has researched a tangentially related topic. Whatever the case, their tunnel vision renders them incapable of actually being helpful to a reader. Take the case of eHowian Edwin Thomas, who tackled "How to Build a Wooden Privacy Fence on a Slope" for HomeSteady.com.

Trenches and Ditches for Dummies

Backfilling a small trench

As the Antisocial Network's staffers roam the internet in search of people being stupid for money (in print, anyway), they occasionally run across content so utterly clueless that they're taken aback. That's exactly what happened when one of the research team members encountered "How to Shore a Trench" at the Leaf Group niche site HomeSteady.com. It took just seconds to realize that freelancer Rachel Lucio was utterly ignorant of her supposed topic when she tried to "write to the title" for eHow.com.