You've reached the bustling little blog here on Good-Tutorials. Feel free to browse it to catch up on all the new features, plans, and news about Good-Tutorials. To comment, please create an account or login. The guy behind Good-Tutorials, Zach Holman, also has a separate blog on industry news, web development, marketing, and other fun stuff, if you're interested.
Betas and testing and versions, oh my!
Posted on August 10, 2008 by Zach Holman / 5 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 on May 21, 2008 by Zach Holman / 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.
Maya Tutorials + Moving Forward
Posted on April 12, 2008 by Zach Holman / 5 comments
Today we welcome Maya tutorials to the site. Requests for support of Autodesk's Maya have always seemed to flow in more than some others, and I think it will be a pretty good complement to topics like Photoshop and 3ds Max.
It's becoming increasingly less of a secret over the last few weeks and months that I'm hard at work with gtv6. It'll be the second version of Good-Tutorials built with Ruby on Rails, and let's just say there's plenty to clean up, refine, and add. New layout, new code (for the most part), lots of new features.
If you're interested in hearing more about development, I occasionally drop hints and requests for feedback over Twitter... you can find me at twitter.com/holman. Feel free to follow me if you have an account. If you have any comments or suggestions in the meantime and you're too lazy to create a Twitter account, feel free to post a comment on this blog or shoot me an email.
Regarding JavaScript alerts
Posted on March 31, 2008 by Zach Holman / 1 comment
Some of you might have been hit with a JavaScript alert box on every page load at Good-Tutorials for about twenty minutes this afternoon or so. It had a really stupid message in it.
Long story short, it wasn't my doing, but it was my responsibility. The alerts came from Snaptalent, a startup that was running the job ads on the sidebar the last day or two. They tossed the code into their JavaScript include, but it's still my responsibility that such mind-boggling annoyance isn't on the site. As such, I've removed their ads from Good-Tutorials and you won't see this problem again.
In other news, there'll likely be a few additions and announcements this weekânew topics added, vague talk about the next version, and so on. Stay tuned. :)
Multiple machine logins
Posted on March 29, 2008 by Zach Holman / 1 comment
Just to keep you up to date on new developments at Good-Tutorials... if any of you were having problems staying logged-in to your account, you'll probably see that working as intended now. Previously logins were effectively tied to machines, so if you hit "remember me" on your laptop and logged in on your desktop, your desktop would log out the laptop. This won't be the case from now on, so if you have multiple machines (or phones or other devices) you should be able to stay logged in as intended.
I'll be back with more updates in a bit. :)
Promoting Photography
Posted on March 23, 2008 by Zach Holman / 3 comments
"Photography" was a relative newcomer to the Photoshop section on Good-Tutorials. It's a good chance that if you're a Photographer, you probably use Photoshop too, after all.
Since then, we've expanded from just Photoshop to a number of different topics. Photography has always been a bit neglected by being cordoned off under Photoshop. That's no longer the case; we've just moved those tutorials into their very own Photography section. Right now everything is filed away under the category of "basics", so bear with us while we go in and reevaluate each Photography tutorial and move them into their proper new categories.
In the meantime... if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see next, sound off in the comments. Have a good one!
Good-Tutorials goes Java
Posted on December 09, 2007 by Zach Holman / 5 comments
As sunjester mentioned in a previous post a few days ago, it's been awhile since we've added new sections to Good-Tutorials. It's true; we've been vamping on the same basic topics for awhile, so we're adding a new topic today: Java Tutorials.
For those of you who have been around for awhile, you might recall that Good-Tutorials ran on Java for a good year and a half or two, so we're happy to have the language on Good-Tutorials now. More sections will be on the way; post a comment or shoot me an email (zach@) if you have any specific suggestions on what you'd like to see next on Good-Tutorials.
Seeking some additional moderators
Posted on November 12, 2007 by Zach Holman / 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 on October 17, 2007 by Zach Holman / 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 on August 12, 2007 by Zach Holman / 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!
