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.


Seeking some additional moderators

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 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 by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 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 by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 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 by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 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 by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 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.