Free pattern instruction distribution poll

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I know that things are a bit confusing here. Some of my patterns have instructions in blog posts, while others are offered as PDF file downloads. So if you go to the Yahoo Group, you will only see a small handful of my patterns. You can always see all of the patterns from the sidebar of my blog, which will take you to a blog post with pattern instructions or a blog post with a link to the Yahoo Group.

I am curious to know what is your preferred method of pattern distribution. I never started out as a pattern writer. I'm just a beginner knitter who liked to experiment and then share my results here in a simple format. Then as I received more email questions about the pattterns, I started adding more info to them (mainly in the notes/abbreviations section) and they eventually got longer and more detailed. I will be the first to admit that they are all poorly written. None of my patterns even offer any information on gauge! (That's something I still have yet to learn about)

At first, all outlines and instructions were in plain text format in my blog posts. That seemed to work well until someone told me that she ended up printing a lot of extra pages of blog "fluff". Besides being wasteful, I also understand that printers are thirsty and ink can get expensive for some people. So I explored other options.

I started transferring some patterns into Word documents which were later converted to PDF files, thinking this would allow people to print just the pattern instructions without the blog "fluff". My next hurdle was to find a place to host the PDF files. Hakucho informed me of a free file hosting site, Quicksharing, which seemed to do the trick for a while. But then the site went kablooie. I needed to find an alternative method and turned to Yahoo Groups (partly because I knew other people who offered their patterns as downloads from their Yahoo Group).

My PDF files have been available on my Yahoo Group (free to join, immediate access to files after joining) for a couple months now and it seemed to be working well. There were some occasional difficulties where people could not figure out how to join the group or could not find where the files were located; this was resolved my them sending me an email and I would just email the PDF files to them. I do that all the time. You can send me email, I promise I won't bite! :-)

Then a blind person sent me email yesterday informing me that she could not read the word verification (that thing to prevent automated registrations) required for joining a Yahoo Group. Now that is a problem. There is a "click here" link for people who can't read it, but it takes you to another Yahoo page which doesn't look helpful at all. After sending her the PDF files, she told me her accessible PDF reader couldn't open the files. Now this is another problem, however I resolved it by emailing her plain text.

By now you are probably wondering where I am going with this prolix posting. I'm just trying to find out what you guys think, and trying to find a sweet spot that works out for most people.


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