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

Posts

You've stumbled on the little blog for Good-Tutorials.


Changes to tutorial pages, moderation

Posted over 9 years ago — 235 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 over 9 years 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.


Contest: Win a Flash and PHP book!

Posted over 9 years 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!)


Need help?

Posted over 9 years ago — 4 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


Bug fixes ahoy!

Posted over 9 years 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.