2007-02-04

Link The Fabulous Manual


I think every homeowner has a drawer or a shelf full of the manuals from their house. Things like, how to change your garage door code and cleaning maintenance for your clothes washer. They are full of useful, but rarely used information. You'd like to just toss the manuals, but you can't...or can you?

Recently I needed to change my garage code. I was unable to find the printed manual so I went online, expecting to be disappointed. Thankfully, I wasn't. My keypad manufacturer had a great set of manuals online in PDF format. Further searching showed that plenty of my printed manuals could be found online. I expect this from electronics, but household applicances have lagged behind a bit.

Wanting to simplify things a little, I figured I can download these manuals, store them on my comptuer, and whip up a quick web page to let me find them quickly.


He's a screenshot of the start of that idea. I plan to replace my quick house drawing with an actual picture of the house and I'll probably not only link the downloaded manuals, but also the manufacturer sites for reference.

I doubt I'll really toss the manuals, but they will get tucked away in the downstairs storage rather than burn precious shelf space. LTFM

1 comment:

Jason said...

Awesome, you've taken a concept I love one step further (LTFM is awesome too, although I still prefer IFF).

I have a folder called "Records" where I store pretty much everything I use to file away. One of the subfolders inside of it is called "Manuals". I actually started about a year ago recycling any manual that I could find online instead.

My stack of probably 100 manuals is down to something like 10 now. As usual, I can't stand paper clutter, and electronic copies and delivery are the way to go.

Now, I just need you to whip up that app/page in a cross-platform manner, and add the ability to add Kids toy manuals, as well as listing of batteries required by each toy (all stuff I keep in text files currently).