You've reached the bustling little blog here on Good-Tutorials. Feel free to browse it to catch up on all the new features, plans, and news about Good-Tutorials. To comment, please create an account or login. The guy behind Good-Tutorials, Zach Holman, also has a separate blog on industry news, web development, marketing, and other fun stuff, if you're interested.
Maya Tutorials + Moving Forward
Posted on April 12, 2008 by Zach Holman / 4 comments
Today we welcome Maya tutorials to the site. Requests for support of Autodesk's Maya have always seemed to flow in more than some others, and I think it will be a pretty good complement to topics like Photoshop and 3ds Max.
It's becoming increasingly less of a secret over the last few weeks and months that I'm hard at work with gtv6. It'll be the second version of Good-Tutorials built with Ruby on Rails, and let's just say there's plenty to clean up, refine, and add. New layout, new code (for the most part), lots of new features.
If you're interested in hearing more about development, I occasionally drop hints and requests for feedback over Twitter... you can find me at twitter.com/holman. Feel free to follow me if you have an account. If you have any comments or suggestions in the meantime and you're too lazy to create a Twitter account, feel free to post a comment on this blog or shoot me an email.
Regarding JavaScript alerts
Posted on March 31, 2008 by Zach Holman / 1 comment
Some of you might have been hit with a JavaScript alert box on every page load at Good-Tutorials for about twenty minutes this afternoon or so. It had a really stupid message in it.
Long story short, it wasn't my doing, but it was my responsibility. The alerts came from Snaptalent, a startup that was running the job ads on the sidebar the last day or two. They tossed the code into their JavaScript include, but it's still my responsibility that such mind-boggling annoyance isn't on the site. As such, I've removed their ads from Good-Tutorials and you won't see this problem again.
In other news, there'll likely be a few additions and announcements this weekânew topics added, vague talk about the next version, and so on. Stay tuned. :)
Multiple machine logins
Posted on March 29, 2008 by Zach Holman / 1 comment
Just to keep you up to date on new developments at Good-Tutorials... if any of you were having problems staying logged-in to your account, you'll probably see that working as intended now. Previously logins were effectively tied to machines, so if you hit "remember me" on your laptop and logged in on your desktop, your desktop would log out the laptop. This won't be the case from now on, so if you have multiple machines (or phones or other devices) you should be able to stay logged in as intended.
I'll be back with more updates in a bit. :)
Promoting Photography
Posted on March 23, 2008 by Zach Holman / 3 comments
"Photography" was a relative newcomer to the Photoshop section on Good-Tutorials. It's a good chance that if you're a Photographer, you probably use Photoshop too, after all.
Since then, we've expanded from just Photoshop to a number of different topics. Photography has always been a bit neglected by being cordoned off under Photoshop. That's no longer the case; we've just moved those tutorials into their very own Photography section. Right now everything is filed away under the category of "basics", so bear with us while we go in and reevaluate each Photography tutorial and move them into their proper new categories.
In the meantime... if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see next, sound off in the comments. Have a good one!
Good-Tutorials goes Java
Posted on December 09, 2007 by Zach Holman / 5 comments
As sunjester mentioned in a previous post a few days ago, it's been awhile since we've added new sections to Good-Tutorials. It's true; we've been vamping on the same basic topics for awhile, so we're adding a new topic today: Java Tutorials.
For those of you who have been around for awhile, you might recall that Good-Tutorials ran on Java for a good year and a half or two, so we're happy to have the language on Good-Tutorials now. More sections will be on the way; post a comment or shoot me an email (zach@) if you have any specific suggestions on what you'd like to see next on Good-Tutorials.
Seeking some additional moderators
Posted on November 12, 2007 by Zach Holman / 26 comments
I've been planning on getting some new features out to expand the moderation process a bit lately but I've been moving through primary computers for a good 3-4 weeks now, so I haven't really been in the development saddle, so to speak. I'm hoping this situation will be fixed up by this week so I can start getting some solid work finished on new features for Good-Tutorials.
In the meantime, that means that I don't quite have the moderation process where I'd envisioned it about a month ago, so to help keep the quality of tutorial moderation at the level we'd want it at I'm looking to get a few more volunteers on the moderation staff.
As I've mentioned a few times in the past, there aren't too many requirements beyond just making sure to go in and rate tutorials on a near-daily basis. I'm hoping that once I can get back to the regular pace of things I can start organizing some interesting fringe benefits for moderators, so that might tickle your fancy down the line if you're interested. In the meantime, it's just more of a casual task aimed towards those of you who are already visiting the site on a near-daily basis anyway.
If you're interested in joining the moderation crew, send an email to zach at good-tutorials with your username on the site and a quick sentence or two describing why you think you're a good fit to moderate tutorials. If you have any questions about becoming a moderator either let me know via email or just post a comment below. Thanks.
New feature of the night: edit your tutorial URLs
Posted on October 17, 2007 by Zach Holman / 9 comments
Long time no update.
I admit; I've been busy in real life and just haven't been able to push out new and crafty updates like we'd all like. But tonight I pushed out a new, much-needed, and long-awaited feature: the ability to edit your own tutorial URLs.
It does happen from time to time: you switch hosts, you update your blogging software, and so on. The past few years we've relied on a non-standardized email process, which, if you've ever had to go through it, sucked. It was clunky, took too many steps, and just took awhile before changes finally were updated.
Now you can log in and move to your account management page: click on update your tutorial URLs and you can see a listing of all of your tutorials. Just paste in the changed URLs for whichever tutorial you're updating and that's it. There's still a review process here just so we can make sure that new URLs submitted are valid and working, but from this point it's really a one-click process that shouldn't take more than a day or so after you submit your updates. The result? If you change your website URLs around, you should only be a day or so away from getting them updated on Good-Tutorials, too.
Some housekeeping tasks, email
Posted on August 12, 2007 by Zach Holman / 13 comments
This is just as a bit of a notice more than anything else. I've shifted a bit on the hosting side of Good-Tutorials. It's very likely that you won't even notice a hiccup (the transfer is already propagating), but as with all of these types of things, there's the chance that there could be some downtime here and there. Naturally I'll keep an eye open, but I think there won't be any problems here.
Also, for those of you who have me in your address books, I'm shifting emails to zach ::at:: good-tutorials.com. The old "goodness" has worn out its welcome (years ago!) and will finally be retired in a few weeks hopefully.
In other news, I've started development on another site that conveniently might interest a lot of you regular Good-Tutorials users. But that's still further down the line. ;) In the meantime, I'm hoping to push out a few updates to Good-Tutorials over the next couple of weeks to keep things fresh and to clean up a few of the smaller issues on the site.
It also looks like Good-Tutorials might be getting some press later this year... I'll keep you posted.
Until next time... have a terribly super awesome day!
A slight refresh
Posted on July 20, 2007 by Zach Holman / 25 comments
So with all of these minor tweaks, additions, and behind-the-scenes retooling, it seemed appropriate to make some more readily apparent changes. I'll call it a slight refresh.
The menu is probably the first thing that caught your eye. The uppercase menu text has been dropped for a more legible menu listing, with stronger color. Readability is the goal here. I've also split up the different sections of the menu so it's not just one big blob on the side of the screen. This isn't necessarily the last iteration of the menu that you'll see, as things might be changing as more topics are added.
One of the reasons the menu changed, however, was that I moved the category listings (not the topic listings) from the sidebar to inside the topic pages itself. For example, here's the new tutorial listing for Photoshop:
http://www.good-tutorials.com/tutorials/photoshop
Categories within the topic are moved to the top of the tutorial listings, and the tutorial sorting and RSS feed link are integrated rather than just floating about.
There's also some more minor style changes across the site... for example, uppercase has been dropped from headings, too, and error boxes aren't so crazy ugly. There should be some more additions to the site in the next few days as well, so feel free to keep your eyes peeled. :)
3ds Max, meet Good-Tutorials
Posted on July 19, 2007 by Zach Holman / 8 comments
After adding the usual suspects (Flash, Illustrator, PHP, etc.), the suggestion that kept popping up in my inbox was fairly consistently "Add 3ds Max to Good-Tutorials!". While I don't want to dilute the main focus of Good-Tutorials with every random bit of software (you won't find any tutorials for WordPerfect 9 any time soon, for example), it seems like there's a lot of overlap between those interested in what's currently listed on Good-Tutorials and those interested in learning more about 3ds Max. So, after a day or two while we wait for the first few 3ds Max tutorials to be submitted, go ahead and check out the new 3ds Max tutorials.
