In Mike’s last post, he mentioned that changes “are A-Brewing”.  For one of those changes, Mike asked if I would be interested in dropping by to talk about MATLAB Central. As most of the readers of this blog probably know, this blog is part of MATLAB Central, our MATLAB online community. I am part of the team who is responsible for the planning and support of our community. I’m just thrilled to be able to come join this blog and talk about things related to our community and our community site. (Thanks Mike for letting me come join the fun on the Desktop blog!) I have a collection of favorite topics that I already have planned, but if you have your own questions, drop me an email.

MATLAB Central is a place for MATLAB users to gather to share their ideas, resources or questions about MATLAB. There are different areas where you can find information. In this first post, I thought I’d take a few minutes for a quick overview in case you haven’t discovered the different parts of our site. Ready? Good, let’s jump in!

Getting started

Web pages and downloads on MATLAB Central are available to all site visitors. Feel free to poke around and check out the different areas. If you want to contribute content or jump into the conversation, you will need to become a member of MATLAB Central and login. If you don’t have an account, it’s easy to join. If you already have an account, skip this step and login to your account.

1. Create an account at MathWorks.com. Start here or click on the link at the top of this page.

   

2. Create your community profile. This is a great place to tell others about yourself and what you are doing with MATLAB. Feel free to include a link to your resume if you want!

Search

If you are looking for information about a particular topic, use the site-wide search at the top of the page. This search bar searches all of MATLAB Central. Click on the dropdown if you want to specify aspecific area of MATLAB Central you want to search. You can even expand your search to include all of MathWorks.com.

Link Exchange

Do you know about a great site related to MATLAB? Link Exchange is where you can go to share that link with other MATLAB users. It’s easy to post the link. Add a description of what you think about the page- how was it useful to you? Using tags will help others to find your contribution.If you are looking for links to other sites talking about MATLAB, go to Link Exchange. You can browse listings, search for particular subjects or click on tags to find content.

Newsreader

Newsreader is where to go if you want to talk to other developers, look for answers, post a question or help out others in need of some advice.

A fun fact is that our Newsgroup application is an interface to the Usenet group “comp.soft-sys.matlab”, affectionately referred to as “cssm”. Any messages posted on this site are automatically shared with other sites who mirror this group. You can see the same conversations on other sites such as Google Groups or MathForum.org. Using tags will help you to find good answers faster on Newsreader. We moderate the posts for spam to help you stay on focused on the MATLAB conversations. You can also keep track of discussions by subscribing using RSS feeds for new conversation or just for topics that you are interested in. With thousands of posts every month, you are bound to find something interesting to talk about!

File Exchange

Have you written some really great MATLAB code that you think other MATLAB developers would want to use? Share your code with others by posting it to File Exchange.

If you are looking for information on topics like Kalman Filters or maybe even looking for a tool to segment objects from images, come visit File Exchange! Like Newsreader and Link Exchange, you can search or browse content and use tags too.

Contest

The MATLAB Central Contest happens every Spring and Fall. Come test your skills against other developers to win cool prizes! Subscribe to the Contest blog for up to date information.

Future Community Posts

I’ll be dropping by to share thoughts and insights about the MATLAB Central Community, including hints on how to use our website applications described in this post. If you have any questions about our community, our community website or you have questions, feel free to post a comment below or you can email me directly at helen.chen@mathworks.com. If you want to be automatically notified when new posts are published, you can subscribe to our RSS feed or be notified by email.

Be talking to you soon!