1. CSS
  2. Flash
  3. HTML
  4. Illustrator
  5. Java
  6. JavaScript
  7. Maya
  8. Photography
  9. Photoshop
  10. PHP
  11. Ruby
  12. Ruby on Rails
  13. 3ds Max

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Posts

You've stumbled on the little blog for Good-Tutorials. These posts are penned by Zach Holman. This blog is a good way to stay current on newest features on Good-Tutorials. If you want to hear some of the inside scoop behind development or catch some sneak peeks at new features, you might be interested in following @holman on Twitter.


Looking for Good-Tutorials Moderators

Posted by Zach Holman 7 months ago — 19 comments

The moderation process has been off a little bit as of late; I'd like to fill a number of new moderator positions to get some more feedback on incoming tutorials and to get better accuracy on tutorial submissions.

Moderators get a warm fuzzy feeling of helping improve this site for everyone, they get a little moderator badge whenever they comment on a tutorial or blog post on this site, and they get a link to their website rotated on the main sidebar of every page on Good-Tutorials. (I'm also open to any other ideas you might have to help thank you guys some more, as well.)

If you're interested in helping out, write a quick post on why you want to be a moderator and your qualifications, and I'll be sure to review your submission as soon as I can. Thanks!


Tweeting the best tutorial each day

Posted by Zach Holman 9 months ago — 9 comments

I'm happy to announce that you can now find @goodtutorials on Twitter.

What is it?

Twitter is a microblogging service; you can send "tweets" of 140 characters or less to your friends, colleagues, or anyone you happen to meet on Twitter. If you follow @goodtutorials on Twitter, you'll get a short, simple link to one tutorial per day.

The Science

Part of the motivation behind this was to not be just another Twitter bot. There seems to be a great deal of bots that just mindlessly regurgitate an RSS feed, post every minute detail, and so on. I'm just not a fan of noise. So @goodtutorials is selective.

Through an exhaustive analysis of the tutorials submitted in the every 24 hours, we pull one tutorial that is most likely the most interesting tutorial of the bunch added that day. This is based on a long list of factors, variables, and normalization procedures; rest assured we're doing Science all over the place. It's likely that this may be one of the "best" tutorials listed that day; it's also possible that it's just a tutorial that many find interesting for one reason or another. Either way, we think you'll like it.

I'd love it if you gave it a shot, followed @goodtutorials on Twitter, and let me know what you think. I'll be improving and tweaking the algorithm over the coming days and weeks, so I'd love to hear if you're digging the chosen tutorials or if you think there's something better listed that day that we missed. Feel free to follow @holman to hear more of my thoughts as well while you're at it.

Happy Thursday!


Let's make things faster

Posted by Zach Holman 9 months ago — 5 comments

Just a quick update to touch base with you all again: last night I rolled out a number of tweaks, optimizations, and updates aimed to reduce response time on the site. An informal monitoring of the site over the subsequent 24 hours or so points towards load on the server being anywhere from a half to a quarter of what it typically is. Savings like that mean that there should be a more consistent load profile; in the past the site has been able to run pretty fast, but it would get bogged down during high traffic and become noticeably slower.

For those of your interested, I turned to god to solve a chunk of these problems. god makes it rather easy to keep on top of out-of-control processes. So far, haven't seen any issues with god that I've seen with monit, so that's certainly a plus.

One last thing: as I mentioned on twitter, I'll be releasing some nifty new functionality in the coming days that you might be interested in trying out. Keep an eye here on the blog or follow me on twitter to be the first to know when it gets released.


Changes to tutorial pages, moderation

Posted by Zach Holman 10 months ago — 18 comments

Rolled out a few new changes tonight:

Staff Links and moderator changes

On the sidebar, you'll now see a "Staff" section. This pulls a random handful of the homepages, business websites, or other links from the profiles of those who volunteer to be a Good-Tutorials moderator. It's a small bit of appreciation for helping everyone out; we wouldn't be able to sort through all of these tutorials without you! The sidebar will update itself every ten minutes or so. There's actually some interesting sites in the mix (some related to design and code, some — perhaps more interestingly — aren't), so feel free to give them a peek and support them every now and then. :)

Along those lines, I pruned the moderator list substantially. We now have a small, core group of moderators, which I'm quite pleased to have. With that said, if you're interested in helping out and becoming a moderator, please let me know by dropping me a line on the Good-Tutorials help site. If you're selected to be a moderator, your site will also enter in the "staff links" section in the sidebar, too.

Tutorial moderation: approvals, declined tutorials, user profiles

There's been a few bug fixes and clarifications added to help clear up the tutorial moderation process.

  • Tutorials now display their status. If they're active and live on the site, they'll show up as usual. If they've been reviewed but didn't make the cut onto the main site, they'll say "reviewed, not listed" next to the date it was submitted. If they're still in the moderation queue and we haven't made a decision on it yet, they'll say "awaiting moderation" next to the date it was submitted. This is a good start at giving you a slightly better idea of whether or not a particular tutorial has made it through the moderation process; I'm planning a few other filters and searches that let you get a better overall handle on all of your tutorials, too.
  • Your user accounts now show all of your tutorials. This means that if your tutorial is declined, they won't disappear into the ethos deep inside of Good-Tutorials. It also means that others can find your tutorials and still visit them even if they didn't make the front page of the site.

I know I've been a little behind with some emails and some of the support requests on the Good-Tutorials help site; if you're waiting to hear back from me, I hope to clear out those issues soon. The holidays messed with my normal day-to-day schedule, so some things got buried in my inbox, unfortunately. I'm slowly catching up, though!

I hope the new changes help you enjoy your Good-Tutorials experience a little bit more. Let me know what you think of them; sound off in the comments below! As always, if you have any specific requests or questions, feel free to create a ticket on the Good-Tutorials Tender or track me down on Twitter. Thanks, and have a good one!


So, did you win the contest?

Posted by Zach Holman 11 months ago — 3 comments

The results are in for our little contest we've been having at Good-Tutorials. Thanks to everyone who participated! This was a fun little distraction of a contest; I think we'll be enlarging the scope (and prizes) of coming contests more, too.

If you spot your username below, you'll be getting an email with details on how to claim your prize within the next few days. Thanks!

Best commenter

ellisgl commented on a number of PHP tutorials, gave some helpful feedback, and will be taking home a copy of Matthew Keefe's Flash and PHP Bible.

Random commenter

ViruKat made a few comments during the contest period and happened to be randomly selected for a copy of Keefe's book. Congrats!

Random rater

npg happened to have their rating selected out of over 750 ratings over the contest period. npg will be scoring a copy of Flash and PHP Bible as well.