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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.


Inviting moderators: here's your chance to help Good-Tutorials

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 7 comments

As you might have heard, the tutorials showing up on Good-Tutorials are rated on by a team of moderators. The good ones make the front page, the bad ones don't. The big hook about this approach is that you need to have a healthy amount of good people at the helm helping pick out which tutorials are good and which aren't so good. We've been doing a pretty good job since launch in keeping up with the queue of submitted tutorials- most tutorials are reviewed with 24 hours of submission, which is a big change from traditional review periods. But, again, the more qualified people we can get working on this the better.

It's a volunteer position, but all we ask is to log in every day or every other day, rate a few tutorials and that's about it. If you're already on a near-daily basis and seem to understand which tutorials you like and which you don't, you're exactly the person we're looking for. In the future there will be additional, more tangible benefits for those moderators that have been dependable and überhelpful. In the meantime, if you're interested, send me an email to goodness ./at/. good-tutorials.com. In the email, include just one simple sentence as to why you think you'd be a good fit. Also include your Good-Tutorials username- that's helpful in seeing how active you've been on the site in the past.


Substantial updates behind-the-scenes

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 3 comments

I'm not sure if you noticed it at all, but Good-Tutorials was down for a few hours last Thursday or Friday, keeping in line with the regular tradition of going down when I happen to be away from my normal work machines and connection (this last downtime was fixed on a 10 year old machine running Windows 98 using AOL 6.0 over dialup).

Anyway, a temporary fix was slapped on until I could get to a more up-to-date environment. After a couple days of investigating and optimizing, I'm feeling a whole lot better about performance, resource usage, and overall stability, so hopefully this sort of downtime will become even less frequent into the future. There aren't any shiny new features for you to play with right now, but there is a lot going into the site behind the scenes nonetheless. Changes all around, really- code, database, web server, application server, OS, and so on. Good-Tutorials is increasingly becoming more popular (which is great), but scalability is always a major concern, although hopefully the worse is behind us.

However, I've done enough of this sort of thing to always be wary of the one-in-a-million chance happenings that, well, can happen, so if you notice any bugs please let me know so I can get on them as soon as possible.

There's also a chance that I might be rocking some DNS changes by the end of the week or the end of next week: by all accounts this should really be unnoticeable in regard to accessing good-tutorials.com, but there's a chance that a handful of emails might be missed. If you email me and don't get a prompt response, by all means resend it, just in case it did get lost in the move. Along those lines, there's a chance I might be moving to a new email address, too, although I'll definitely have a grace period for the old account. I'll keep you in the loop if there's anything amiss.

Thanks for bearing with me through all of this!


Users, you may now sort your tutorials

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 8 comments

I launched the new version of the site on the pretext of getting it out the door quickly, so everyone could use the site's new features. To do that, I skimped out on a couple features with the intention to pick up those extra features within a month of the site's release. I did nail down a majority of those issues and features in the first few weeks after release, but one thing that has been notably missing has been tutorial sorting. Until now, that is.

Go ahead and check it out: most-commented Photoshop tutorials. On each page you can now sort by date (the default listing), rating, comments, clicks, and saves. Unfortunately it wasn't something I could just toss in there in a couple minutes; I had to change a few things around on the backend. The result of fiddling with those changes is that each page view on the site is roughly 25-50% faster. Not too shabby when you add new features to the site and it reduces load on the server.

I know this feature should have been in there earlier and I know I haven't been adding a lot of stuff to the site in the past few weeks, but this is a good start to getting back into the swing of things. Hopefully it'll help a lot of you out; sorting by comments and by rating in particular is something that I find particularly nifty. So feel free to help everyone out by rating tutorials and commenting when you want to share your experiences on a particular tutorial.


Small delays in tutorial approval, click tracking

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 5 comments

Just wanted to pop in and mention that there was a glitch in tutorial processing over the last few days. If you've experienced a backlog of your tutorials not going up in the customary 24 hours, well, that's fixed now. There was a funny, rather unique situation with IP addresses that goofed it up, of all things. After a few hours, things should slide back to normal again.

Yes, I know I've been less visible on the site over the last few weeks, with very minimal new features coming in. This will be slowly changing over the next few weeks, so sit tight for the time being. Apologies for the inactivity to this point. :)


Playing email catch-up

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 12 comments

My apologies to anyone who has sent an email to me recently and haven't yet gotten a reply. I just finished up finals and I have just moved halfway across the country, so life has been a bit hectic, to say the least. Over the next day or two I hope to make a big dent on getting back up to date and fixing a bug or two. Along those lines- new featured tutorials are more or less on hold for the next 24-48 hours while I squash a rare (but persistent) bug.

After I'm caught up with emails and all the not-so-fun administrivia aspects of Good-Tutorials, I can get started on getting back to coding fun and exciting new stuff.

Have a good one!