Art, Technology & People

Good evening everyone! I’m pretty stoked about finally delivering the v5 update to you guys, although at this point expectations must be so high that I’m getting worried that this will be as cool as you all hope. I’ve been staring at it for months and I still giggle like a school boy when I see some of these new toys Nick has put together, so it can’t be all that bad right?! As we enter the final stretch, Nick is working very hard on the Publishing System, which is getting a huge make-over.

We really feel that the Publishing System, which is the area where members can host their tutorials for free on our site, including image and attachment upload and management, is a very valuable and appreciated tool, but it needed some massaging before it was used more frequently. Well this update will be HUGE for the publishing system, with a ton of new features that will do everything short of writing the tutorials for you. We’re integrating additional image and attachment support with a better interface, AND introducing video tutorial support! We’re launching the new site with FLV support only (we’ll have a tutorial on how to convert any of your videos to FLV format before you upload) but an automated conversion system similar to YouTube will be added shortly after launch along with several other areas we’re going to be introducing.

The image interface will also be getting quite an upgrade and along with a nifty thumbnail size slider, added tag, description and search functionality, you will now be able to share image collections with all your tutorials instead of 1 collection per tutorial like the current site. The publishing system will also be closely tied in to our upcoming credit system with numerous credit earning features.

Another exciting feature will be the tutorial recovery system, which is inspired from Word where a document can be recovered in the event that the program crashes or exits unintentionally before you save your work. Accidentally click on a button or close your browser in the middle of typing out a tutorial? No problem, go back to the Publishing System and you can access the lost document from the recovery console in a single click, or stick to your last saved document. The editor also comes with an auto-save feature you can turn on and off as desired to further help you avoid disasters!

So that’s it for another update gang, I hope you like what you see and I think we should be able to squeeze in another update or two before launch.

Take care!
Dan

Yeah that's right, I went there!

OK honestly, I don't know if this can be done but I think everyone has felt the full brunt of my frustration over how long this release has taken (what? like… a YEAR now?!) and I have asked this to be out the gate by the end of April because this needs to get done. We might have some bugs and holes to fill and whatnot, but I'm kind of fed up at this point and want to get rockin and have some fun with the new release. I figure if I publicly state that we release at the end of April, maybe that will force us to get our arses in gear and finish up lol!

So yeah, just between you and me… end of April! Be thar or be square!

Dan

PS. This recession stuff blows.

Hey guys! I wanted to take a quick minute to introduce you to some AMAZING sculpture design work that I was recently turned on to by my buddy Neal. Check out the world of Kris Kuksi!

Kris is an artist based out of Kansas in the USA and creates these mind boggling sculptures that you simple can not fully grasp without hours of study, they are simply THAT intricate. His work has been featured in many expos and exhibitions and I would LOVE to see some of this in person. Check it all out at kuksi.com and get ready to pick your jaw up off the floor. From his site:

Kuksi’s art speaks of a timelessness–potentiality and motion attempting to reach on forever, and yet pessimistically delayed; forced into the stillness of death and eternal sleep. He treats morbidity with a sympathetic touch and symbolizes the paradox of the death of the individual by objective personification of death. There is a fear of this consciousness because it drops in upon us without mercy, and yet there is a need to appeal to it in order to provide a sense of security, however deluded that sense may be. Kuksi’s art warns us that this appeal is irrelevant, and that we should be slow to create a need for it. His themes also teach us that although death may pursue us arbitrarily, we should never neglect to mourn the tremendous loss of individual potential.

Gorgeous stuff, check it out when you have a chance, you won’t regret it! For those of you that are in to Digg, you can digg a small post I made about his site by clicking here!

Thanks!
Dan

It’s a feature we introduced in the main v3 update (if I remember right) but I wasn’t a fan of it’s accessibility and the new update is a perfect chance to rethink the implementation of tutorial favorites.

Spring break is upon us and I know Nick is very hard at work trying to get as much done on v5 as possible before the hectic school schedule hits at full force again next week. Hopefully we can polish off the Publishing System and a few other loose ends and then finish up the newsletter and other bits. So yeah, I’m hounding him constantly and I need to start working on the new documentation and write-ups all this stuff is going to need.

Tonight I wanted to talk a little bit about the Faves system, which is the integrated bookmarking system allowing members to flag specific tutorials as “Faves” (favorites) and then easily call them up as needed. This was a long requested feature by MANY users who wanted an easy way to tag tutorials they would like to easily find later down the road, and with 22,171 current faves on the site, the system was obviously a welcomed addition. Despite it’s success, I always felt it was a bit clunky to use… marking tutorials as faves was easy enough, it was a single click on the faves icon. But recalling your faves list would force you to leave whatever page or search you were currently doing, and for those of you that had large fave lists, you had no way to really sort or search your faves.

Those days are OVA!

The new faves listing can now be called up with a single click without having to load a new page or leaving/screwing up your current search or form you were in the middle of filling out etc. The Faves list loads right on top of whatever you are working on for a quick glance with full paging, various sorting tools (you can sort by category, title or date) and even a built in keyword search for you fave addicts! Once you’re finished, click the close button and you’re right back to whatever page you were working on when you first accessed your faves list. And adding tutorials to your faves list is as easy as always, simply click the faves check-mark icon and it’s done!

So hope you guys dig the new faves setup. Before I click on spellcheck and then the publish button, I wanted to quickly touch on a great suggestion provided by Barry in the comments of my last P2L v5 Update post, where he suggests the following:

Just a quick idea. Have you thought about a has your tutorial been added to our tutorial index before feature? I’m not sure this would really be needed but it may reduce duplicate entries or 400 tutorials on how to make the date display on a page with php.

This is actually a fantastic suggestion that I have had in the back of my mind for a long time and will be something I bring up with Nick as a post-update release on the site. Currently the only duplicate checking we do on tutorials is URL based because of people resubmitting declined tutorials over and over again. I think having something that says “Hey we found tutorials with similar keywords in the title, is this a dupe?” would be a great idea, so thanks and we’ll definitely look in to that.

That’s it for me gang, have a great spring break! (yes I know some of you don’t start until next week or possibly the week after… consider this advanced well wishes) Please be sure to chare your comments by clicking on the comment button below, just try to keep it on topic *cough* Matt *cough*

Take care,
Dan

No matter what we add to the site and what goodies or features we introduce, our core business is tutorials and we will end where we started, submitting tutorials.

We’ve added quite a bit to the site over the years, but from day 1, we’ve been about the tutorials and finding the easiest ways to submit them. We’ve mentioned in the past that we were looking at an auto-submit API, and that is still a possibility, but we’ve had to shelve that for now while we work on other features. BUT what we did do was streamline the submission process for our most basic feature: submitting your tutorial links.

I think you’re really going to enjoy to changes we’ve added to this process overall… the submission process is basic, but it’s easily the most used feature on the site, so naturally tweaking this to even shave off seconds will amount to hours of saved time overall for the hundreds of webmasters that submit to our site. Here are some of the changes you will find with the new submission page:

Multiple Category Submissions

You will no longer have to submit your tutorials 1 category at a time… on the current system, you have to fill out and submit the form for each category you want to submit. So as an example, if you have 5 PHP tutorials and 5 Photoshop tutorials, you would have to fill out and submit the tutorials in 2 sessions… 1 for PHP and 1 for Photoshop. With the new system, you can submit all the categories in a single session.

No need for numbers!

You no longer need to worry about how many tutorials you are submitting.. you add each tutorial on-the-fly! So you fill out the form for your first entry, click add and it’s added to the submission list and you can fill in the next tutorial entry, or go ahead and complete the submission.

The Submission List

As you add tutorials to your submission session, the page maintains a submission list that is updated via AJAX as you add each tutorial. The list is gives you an instant preview of how your submission will look, and you can instantly edit or delete any tutorials in your submission list. Once you’ve added all the tutorials you want to submit, you can preview the entire list in the submission list, then go ahead and click Finish and the submission is processed.

Intelligent Form Processing

On top of the streamlined system, the submission form itself has some additional validation intelligence to help make your submissions easier and prevent submission errors. We often receive submissions with URL errors, so the site automatically validates your tutorial’s URL and alerts you if it is not valid when you add it to the submission list. You also won’t have to manually fill out your email address to receive the approval alerts, it will automatically fill it in for members based on your account email address, and from there you can change or opt to remove it if you wish.

So there’s a look at the new submission process for submitting your tutorial links, I hope you like the new improvements!

See you next post and keep those comments coming!

Thanks,
Dan