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.


New RSS feeds, new category, new date views, bug fixes

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 35 comments

There's a number of new things to announce for Good-Tutorials right now. Some of them are features from the old version, some of them are new features altogether, some of them are tweaks to existing aspects, and some are just the normal first-week bug fixes. Here's the changes:

RSS feeds

I've added a number of new RSS feeds to the site. They're all categorized and explained on the RSS page, but in short you can now subscribe to per-topic feeds and user feeds (submissions, comments, and saves). User feeds themselves are rather cool- you could grab the RSS feed for your user account and display your recent comments on your web blog, for example.

New category: PHP

The new Flash category is doing quite well, with a number of new tutorials submitted to it each day. We're going to continue that expansion to PHP, the popular scripting language. For a few years now I've had to combat people submitting PHP-related tutorials to the site, even though it was exclusively Photoshop-centric for years. Now all of you who submitted anyway can submit your PHP-related tutorials for real and they might actually have a chance of being accepted. ;) The same process is going to happen for PHP as it did for Flash: users are now able to submit PHP tutorials, but the "PHP" link won't show up in the sidebar until a day or three later.

New date-based view

This is a pull-over from the old version of Good-Tutorials. Each tutorial is now has their date linked to a page that will show all of the tutorials added on that particular day. This is easily accessible from the front page: you can now easily click to see all of the tutorials added yesterday, and you can click to see all of the tutorials added today. Along those lines, the front page is now showing the last 20 tutorials instead of just the last 15. All of this will hopefully let you stay on top of newly-added tutorials a little bit easier now.

In addition, there was the normal bunch of bug fixes and smaller feature additions- stuff like expanding the comment box, for example, little things like that.

Have a good one!


Second round of moderators

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 13 comments

I'm really pleased with how the initial batch of moderation is going; we're getting good tutorials to the front page and we're skipping over a lot of the less-than-good tutorials. With that said, though, I want to increase the scope of things a bit, particularly since there really is a lot of tutorials coming in and I want to give each a solid chance of review. For those of you who applied on the original call-for-moderators post, check your email again; there's a subset of you that might have gotten an invite to moderating now.

If you still didn't get an invite or if you're interested in serving as a moderator in the future and never got the chance to apply, sit tight; later down the line I might be asking for more volunteers, particularly when there's more and more topics getting added. For the time being, though, I think there'll be a relatively good-sized amount here.


Feed Day - RSS is back

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 5 comments

Tonight RSS makes its triumphant return back to the site. For those of you not in the loop, it's a really easy way to keep track of all of these new tutorials (and blog posts) popping on the site now. It's likely that you won't have to change your RSS reader URL for this new version, but just as a recap:

Newest Tutorials

http://feeds.feedburner.com/good-tutorials-new

Latest Blog Posts

http://feeds.feedburner.com/good-tutorials-blog

Latest Blog Comments

http://feeds.feedburner.com/good-tutorials-blog-comments

That's the start- there'll be per-topic RSS feeds in the near future, so stay tuned. You can always refer back to these RSS feeds at the new RSS page:

http://www.good-tutorials.com/rss


A Day of Fixes - Discounted Featured Tutorials

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 13 comments

So we've been through about a day and a half of the new version. There's been a lot happening- mostly bug fixes, but I'm happy that none of the bugs uncovered were very substantial. There's still a lot more to do, but I think I'm on a pretty decent pace for the moment.

A few hours ago I pushed out a new iteration with a whole bunch of bug fixes and issue corrections. Some of this included fixing the last remaining barriers to being completely valid XHTML Transitional, adding "change password" to your user account pages (I promise "forgot password" will be coming in the coming days), got daily and monthly click totals running again (although they aren't properly rotating as of now, but I'll probably do that short fix tomorrow), there were a few user profile fixes done, advertising optimizations, server-side speedups, and a whole bunch of smaller stuff that you'll probably never notice unless you look for them.

I still have about 10-15 items on my todo list of small things that I want to finish up on by the end of the week, but then at that point I can start going from "bug fixing" mode to "feature writing" mode.

As one last little treat now that the launch has happened and things seem a bit more relaxed- I've reduced the prices on featured tutorials by a whole bunch (front page is at $15/day, which is a little nuts). First come, first served, though, since the last time I did this I had got a whole slew of orders in a day or three, so it probably won't last long. I just want to get some more reactions to the featured tutorial process now that it's been greatly updated.

Have a good one!


Welcome to Good-Tutorials

Posted by Zach Holman over 2 years ago — 71 comments

Welcome to the new version of Good-Tutorials. The transfer took a lot longer than expected, which was an unsettling development. Things were just running relatively great, and then all of the sudden we hit a major snag. Hopefully everything's running fine and dandy now, though- please comment if you notice anything amiss.

So... hooray! What's new, you say?

New Layout

Brand new layout. I love it and think it's a huge improvement over all my old designs, although I know there will always be that vocal minority who just think it's the worst design ever to grace anything. I'm not going to pay much attention to rants, but if you have any constructive criticism or comments, please let me know- I'll do what I can to improve things. I fixed a lot of IE6 bugs last night, but let me know if there are any other layout bugs that I should know about and I'll work on them- just post your browser+OS.

New Database

Okay, this isn't as nifty, but it's by far the largest change. The database powering the site is completely redone. That's part of the reason why the changeover took so long, but it'll hopefully be for the best. It should be pretty quick right now, but over the next few days and weeks I'll be optimizing the database further, so the site should overall be much faster than ever before.

New Tutorials

Well, the tutorials are still the same, but there are plenty of new aspects for the tutorials. The system is now moderated by a number of moderators instead of just one guy- this means there'll probably be more tutorials added that will appeal to you (and if you're a tutorial author this also means that your tutorials will be reviewed in 24 hours flat now). This is a really new way of handling tutorials, so forgive us if there's some growing pains in the first week or so- I'll be tweaking a few different parameters the first few days to try to find a happy medium to get the best tutorials on the front page. Along those lines- eventually there will be new tutorials added every half hour or hour, but for now it's going to be irregular while we catch up on the backlog of pending submissions from the old version. Also new to tutorials are ratings and comments, which are linked to your user account.

New Features for Authors

If you write tutorials, you're in for a treat. Just log in to your account and head to your user account dashboard for a slew of things you can do- including manage your tutorials, see your newly submitted tutorials, feature tutorials (a completely revamped process), and so on. There will be a few new aspects for tutorial authors added to the site in the next few weeks, so trust me, this is just the start.

New Topics

I've been asked in the past "alright, Good-Tutorials rocks, but why not add tutorials for xxxxxxx?" My answer has always been that I wanted to get the base process with one topic (Photoshop) streamlined until I expanded. Well, I think I've made good headway on that. With the new version there'll be new topics added, most likely on a weekly basis (more on this later). Right now you'll see there's only Photoshop listed, but after the first day or so without any major glitches, I'll be adding the first new topic or two. (If you really want to see something new, go ahead and comment on this blog post with your nomination for new topics- I have a good idea, but if there's a bunch of votes for a particular aspect, I'd love to hear it).

Reclaim Your Tutorials

Okay, so this isn't exactly the new hotness, but it should be done. If you've submitted tutorials before, you'll probably want those tutorials associated with your user account. For the most part it should be an automated process- just head to your old author page:

http://www.good-tutorials.com/author/author-name

and there will be a link at the bottom to "reclaim tutorials". More information is on that page.

New Newness

Part of the cool thing about the new site is that it's so much more maintainable than before. This is something I've been wanted to do for awhile: regular updates. So with the new version of the site, there will be weekly updates with fun new stuff added to the site. You'll find them announced right here, on the new blog. I haven't decided when the best time for me will be to add new features, but eventually there will be a set day where you can come back each week to see something new- stay tuned. (Naturally, however, there will be a few fixes, tweaks, etc that will be made this first week as we adjust to growing pains with the new release, so th new week here will be busy for me).

Other Notes

There's a lot of other, more minor cool things added to the site that don't warrant a whole blog post. I probably didn't explain all the new stuff too well on this one, actually- I'm on the tail end of a 12-hour work session trying to get everything ready for the new version, so I'm pretty fried. So let me know if there's anything you're unclear about or have questions about.

There's still work to be done. Please take note of that. I mentioned in the old blog that I wanted to launch with a little bit fewer features in order to launch the site much sooner, since I think I hit most of the really important stuff. Features like additional XML feeds, some user account data, a few pages that used to be in the old menu, advanced search, etc., will be added first- probably in the first week or two after release, so don't fret if you don't see something here yet. I should have most of the major aspects, though.

My apologies in advance if you're still unclear on something or if you're angry that something's broken- as I've said, this isn't the final version, there will be plenty of work done over the next few days in particular and over the next week in general. In the meantime, I really hope you enjoy this new version- I've spent the last three months working on it, the last 12 hours straight transferring and setting it up, and the new few days fixing it, so have fun with it while I try to relax for a few days. :o) And please, comment away on this post- I would absolutely love to hear what you think about it.

Have a good one!