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Website of the Week — Instructables

07 March 2008
Website of the Week: Instructables - Download (MP3) audio clip
Website of the Week: Instructables - Listen (MP3) audio clip

Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations. Our web guide is Rob Sivak.

Today, it's a site for do-it-yourselfers, and those who never imagined that they could do it themselves.

WILHELM: "Instructables is a place where people share the things they do and how they do it. We call it the world's biggest show-and-tell. Users share and show off the projects that they've built, the things that they've created, and they build a community around that and discuss things and inspire each other."

Eric Welhelm is the founder of Instructables.com, a website where thousands of contributors have posted instructions on doing an unimaginably wide range of tasks.

WILHELM: "There's around 10,000 projects. There's art and craft and food and photography, tech projects, ride — which is bikes and cars, home projects, green projects for making your life greener, offbeat projects. All sorts of things from home repair to taxidermy."

The projects recently featured on Instructables' homepage include making earrings out of old bits of electronic circuit board, ferment-it-yourself Kombucha tea, and a home-built burglar alarm system using lasers that looks like it came out of a Hollywood movie.

But Wilhelm says Instructables is about more than just making things ...

WILHELM: "The thing that I love is when someone puts a project up and they then make connections with other people that they would otherwise have not made. So, for example, you show how to make a chair or some specific woodworking tutorial. And then, a local college or something connects with you and says, 'Hey, would you like to come teach a class on this technique in our design school or something?' Those types of connections are happening all the time to people who post stuff on Instructables. And that's really what I want to have happening. I want to have people sharing what they do and then impacting others and making connections. They're all just in the community building things and helping each other out. So it's really a great place."

Become part of the "instructables community" and learn how to create almost anything imaginable — or unimaginable — at instructables.com, or get the link from our site, voanews.com/ourworld.

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