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

Advertise

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.


We're still standing

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 3 comments

A few days later and things are starting to — dare I say — run smoothly.

I just wanted to recap some of the fun new things that have been pushed live since the new version itself has been pushed live:

  • I just moved Good-Tutorials onto a larger slice at Slicehost. I know things have been rough as of late; there have been times where things have been really quick, and there have been times were things have slowed to an abslute crawl. I spent some time yesterday concentrating solely on performance improvements, which went well, and with tonight's capacity increase it should be pretty quick from this point on. We'll know more as the week progresses.
  • A few notable bugs have been fixed, including Firefox and IE woes with tutorial submission, RSS errors on the main feed, and the new automated billing system. There's plenty of smaller bugs to tackle, of course, but luckily they're decreasing in severity.
  • RSS feeds are up and running, and I just added the RSS feed for these blog posts. Another interesting page you might want to check out from time to time is the comments page (RSS link).

As a reminder, you can report bugs and request new features at the new Good-Tutorials Lighthouse:

http://good-tutorials.lighthouseapp.com/projects/17210-bugs (bugs)

http://good-tutorials.lighthouseapp.com/projects/17883-features (feature)


Welcome to Good-Tutorials, version 6

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 23 comments

Happened to notice anything different upon your latest visit to this site? Good. We've finally released the long-anticipated sixth version.

This has been in the works for quite some time. I know I started sketching new looks and thinking about what should be changed starting somewhere around early 2008. It had to take a backseat to a few more pressing cornerstones in my life (graduating from college, moving across the country, and starting my "real" career), but I'm pleased to say that I'm extremely happy that this is finally out and public.

There's plenty in store for Good-Tutorials yet. Now that v6 is out the door, I'm going to be fixing the inevitable bugs that spring up after this release, and then I'm going to dive right into v6.1, which I'm planning to add some really cool functionality that I've been wanting to add for quite some time. So, even though this is the culmination of months of work, trust me, there's plenty more on the way.

So, what's really in the new version? Yippee, a new layout, right? Naturally, there's way more to it than meets the eye. Here's a quick summary of some of the main additions in gtv6.

New in Version 6

  • A hot, new layout.
  • Big changes to advertising: fully automated (no more waiting for approval for your ads), better overview of the scheduling of your ads, history support, and more.
  • Open moderation. Everyone can participate in choosing which tutorials are good enough to make Good-Tutorials. Moderators still play a very important part, but getting more people involved will be better for everybody.
  • Search functionality has been improved, allowing for searches within a specific topic. Also has a cleaner URL structure to allow for easy bookmarking of searches.
  • You can now use a gravatar with your account, which shows up on your tutorials and comments.
  • Comments now use Markdown, so you can add links, code, formatting, and so on in your messages.
  • Refined tutorial submission page. No more scrolling through all of the topics and categories to submit your tutorial.
  • Updated tutorial listings — rate, save, and report tutorials with just one click now.
  • User pages are much more refined and useful. You can see an activity stream of what you've done recently.
  • Tutorial links now retain a :visited pseudo class so it's easier to see which tutorials you've seen already.
  • Expanded sorting — you can now sort all tutorials by saves, rating, and so on rather than just seeing the top 25 of those areas.
  • Additional anti-spam measures to make sure the site isn't flooded with crap.
  • Added account activation, so you can (finally!) have a way to reset your password if you've forgotten it.
  • Implements OpenSearch, which lets you search Good-Tutorials from the comfort of your (IE7 or Firefox 2+) browser.

I hope you're as excited about the new Good-Tutorials as I am. I would absolutely love to hear your questions and feedback in the comments section below; I know there's a lot of new-ness here, a lot of change, and there's inevitably going to be something that doesn't work out and will have to be updated, so the more friendly feedback I can get, the faster that can get done. And if you do find any bugs or have any specific feedback on a specific area or problem you're facing, please feel free to take a quick trip to the new Good-Tutorials Lighthouse, where I'll be tracking bugs and feature requests as they come in.

Thanks, and I greatly look forward to chatting with each and every one of you in the comments.


Slow requests

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 4 comments

We're hitting some heavy load right now, unfortunately, so if Good-Tutorials seems really slow lately, that's the reason why. We're looking into it.


Betas and testing and versions, oh my!

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 15 comments

Still a few more details that need hammering out, but I'm nearing the point where I'll be setting up a new box, pushing out the new version 6 code, setting up issue trackers, and being in need of a few good beta testers to help me bang on it for a bit before I do the full release to the public.

It'll be fun.

As I alluded to, the schedule's still a bit variable yet, but I'm hoping that within the next few weeks I'll be looking for a few people (and then perhaps quite a bit more) to help test things out, get impressions on the new version, and so on. I tend to sit on Twitter quite a bit, so that's a good place to start if you want to hear about it before everyone else. Feel free to follow @holman if you're on Twitter. At some point, I'm sure there will be the inevitable blog post once things gets rolling, so that's another option further down the line.

I'm really looking forward to getting this stuff live; there's a lot of cool new stuff that you're bound to enjoy.


Grab a free Photoshop book

Posted by Zach Holman about 1 year ago — 2 comments

Okay, I'll admit it. Tutorials are great... they're usually free, straightforward, open for support from the author, and are bite-sized help in learning a new topic, but there's also something to be said for more traditional routes of learning. Books, for example, let you get a more in-depth look at what you're studying, and they can be a real help in getting a more comprehensive understanding of the topic at hand. So yes, the owner of the leading tutorial website fully endorses books, too! (Though in conjunction with a healthy dose of online tutorials, naturally.)

So, with that said, I'll recommend one more thing to you: SitePoint is releasing their Photoshop book in digital form for free for thirty days. Since Good-Tutorials has some deep Photoshop roots (we were Photoshop-only for years, of course), there are a lot of people here that would benefit from this. I actually have the dead tree version of the book, too, which I'm quite happy with. I actually have a number of SitePoint books in my bookshelf: the JavaScript Anthology, DHTML Utopia, the PHP Anthology, and the Photoshop Anthology. (I read their first book before it went to press too.) Needless to say, I think they write good stuff, and if you're in the market for a good, free Photoshop book, you might want to look at this one before you have to buy it in a couple weeks.

Disclaimer: While I stand by everything I wrote and I am a happy consumer of SitePoint books, SitePoint is an advertiser on Good-Tutorials.