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.

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Contest: Win a Flash and PHP book!

Posted by Zach Holman 12 months ago — 0 comments

Want to pick up a free book on PHP and Flash? Lucky you; we're giving away three copies of Matthew Keefe's Flash and PHP Bible.

The goal of this "contest" is to make it easy for you to win. You don't have to be a Photoshop genius and paint a ridiculous illustration, you need not be a CSS guru, or even a Rails rockstar. There's plenty of other contests to join if you are. If you're running through tutorials, learning, applying yourself, and growing through the process, then this contest is for you.

The Contests

Simple rules to this. Sign up for an account if you haven't already, and give it a shot:

• Best commenter I'll be keeping track of comments through the course of the contest. The person with the most insightful or helpful comment on a tutorial wins. Did you enjoy that tutorial? Is there anything the author of the tutorial left out? Is there anything the author did really well? Do you have any results to show off after going through the tutorial? Is there anything you can add to the conversation that might help out other users who read the tutorial? This contest will be won by the user wit the most admirable comments during the contest.
• Random commenter If you comment on Good-Tutorials at all during the contest period, you're automatically a potential winner of this one. The more comments you make, the greater the chance you'll be randomly pulled as the winner. (Within reason, of course; it's pretty easy to spot spam, which unfortunately is a no-no. Just stick to the topic at hand, offer some helpful feedback or other comment, and you'll do fine.)
• Random rater Another goal is to try and get more people involved with tutorial ratings; the more people who rate tutorials, the more accurate our ratings are for everyone to view. Same sort of idea as the random commenter contest; by all means, rate away, but randomly spamming the site is pretty easy to spot, so don't do it. A fantastic place to start is the upcoming tutorials section; not only will you get your ratings counted for the contest, but you'll help us pick which tutorials are good enough for the front page.

The Prize

For each of the three mini-contests mentioned above, we're giving the winner a copy of Matthew Keefe's Flash and PHP Bible. It covers some rich interactive topics for using Flash and PHP together, tackling it from a by-example point of view (which tends to work best for me, personally).

The Rules

Just want to run a quick and simple contest, so I'll just say this: have fun, and be respectful. As I said, it's pretty easy to notice if you suddenly rate 20,000 tutorials in one day. ;)

I'd like for this to work out quite simply for both you and for me; I already have a few other books from other publishers lined up for future contests if this goes well. This contest ends at the end of day Friday, December 5, 2008, Pacific Time. Gives you about a week and a half to go at it. Not too short, not agonizingly long. Have at it, and feel free to comment below if you have any comments or questions (it'll even count towards your comment count in the contest!)

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Need help?

Posted by Zach Holman 12 months ago — 2 comments

Like a few others this week, Good-Tutorials is going the trendy route and is going to give Tender a shot for support-related issues. It's a new app in private beta from ENTP that helps tie in support-related requests into Lighthouse, their issue tracking app.

It's going to take the same place as how we were using Lighthouse for both bugs you spot and for any feature requests you might have. In addition — and something that I'm really looking forward to — they have a separate area for FAQs and support-related articles. I plan on writing up a more comprehensive article on tutorial submission guidelines soon, so for you authors out there with an ambiguous idea of what we're looking for in a tutorial this should help clarify things. I'll also be adding a few other FAQs for users, too, so you might want to drop in and take a peek over the next few days.

You can submit new issues (without even needing to create an account!) at:

http://help.good-tutorials.com

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Bug fixes ahoy!

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 4 comments

Just pushed a lot of bug fixes to the main site: lots of issues with legacy-related changes (new URLs and so on), added a few speed-related issues, cached a few longer-running queries, and so on. Also have been catching up with some backlogged emails and other administrative details. All in all, just pushing for some more stability and reliability on the site. The site can be pretty speedy most of the time, but I know at higher loads during the day it can get a little bit more sluggish, so that's somethin I'll continue to work on.

While we're on the bug fixing topic, for those of you with Rails-based sites, definitely give Hoptoad a crack. Makes sleuthing around for these exceptions a heck of a lot easier, and it's really not too difficult to plug into an existing app.

It's also another good time to mention the Good-Tutorials Lighthouses again. If you have any bugs that you found or if you have any feature requests, definitely post it up on our Lighthouse. I'll get cracking on new features again here shortly, now that the site's acting pretty predictably well, so now's the time to ask.

View existing bugs and feature requests.

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Becoming a Good-Tutorials Moderator

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 5 comments

Want to make the world a better place? Becoming a Good-Tutorials moderator is the very foundation for building a better Earth.

Slight exaggeration aside, we could really use your help with moderating. As Good-Tutorials expands, we get more and more tutorials submitted every day. The more people we can get to help moderate these new tutorials, the better everyone's experience will be. We can get the better tutorials listed on the front page so that every Good-Tutorials visitor can benefit.

What's the difference between a normal user and a moderator? This recent blog post helps cover that. In a nutshell, since a moderator tends to see more tutorials and have more experience, how they rate a tutorial matters more. You'll also get the coveted "moderator" title next to your name on your comments. There's also a number of other things in mind for moderators in the near future, too.

If you're interested in donating a few minutes a day or a few times a week to helping sift through tutorials, shoot me an email at zach I at I good-tutorials.com. Include with it: 1. Your Good-Tutorials username, and 2. A short paragraph or two of why you think you're qualified to moderate tutorials (and which topics you're interested in).

If you're interested in helping out but are unsure about the commitments necessary, always feel free to head to the upcoming listings and rate a few tutorials... the more the merrier!

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!

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Tutorials need love, too

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 3 comments

The new version has brought a slew of changes with it, and the tutorial moderation process is no different. Hopefully this blog post helps give a good recap of how tutorials get rated and moved to the front page for everyone to see.

Everything in moderation

So the problem we face is that we get a lot of tutorials submitted each day. That’s a great problem to have, of course. It means we can be selective and take only the best tutorials for everyone to see. But we still have the problem of figuring out which tutorials are the best. That’s where you come in.

It ends up using a model similar to other sites that face the same challenge, like a digg or a facebook. Basically, you take everyone’s opinion, gather them together, and hopefully at the end of that process you have a pretty good judgement of whether that particular tutorial is good or not.

On Good-Tutorials, everything is done in the upcoming queue. It lets you take a peek at the newest tutorials submitted before they actually make it to the front page. Those of you who like to be “in the know” before everyone else, well, here’s your time to shine. But more importantly, it lets anyone who’s interested help shape which tutorials make it to the front page. The better the rating a tutorial gets, the better chance it has of getting moved to the front page after 24 hours.

Meet the moderators

On the last version of the site, we had a concept of moderators. They did a great job helping approve tutorials and weed out bad links. With everyone helping out with tutorial moderation, moderators take on a slightly changed role. Their primary focus is the same: help figure out which tutorials are good. They tend to do this more frequently than your normal, casual user, and as such the rating they give to a tutorial is weighted higher than a normal user’s rating. Along similar lines, my own rating is weighted a bit higher than a moderator’s rating, too; after seeing somewhere upwards of 60,000-70,000 tutorials, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on things. Everyone’s rating then comes together and helps determine whether a tutorial gets rotated to the front page or not.

Improving the process

I hope this helps clarify some of the process for you. I want to be as open as I can be with these matters, and part of that means I look forward to hearing from you if you have any suggestions to improve tutorial moderation. Post a ticket on the Good-Tutorials Lighthouse if you have any specific suggestions, or just post a comment here for more generalized feedback.

In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be posting some updates to this blog as we continue to improve and scale the tutorial moderation process by adding more dedicated moderators to the site.