News

Updates for July
July 7, 2008 - 01:11 pm

 

I probably got a little bit more tanned, not from the exposure to the summer sun, but from staying in with my moniters all the time. :( But, it's been insanely busy. There are lots of things I'd like fixed, lots of improvements I'd like made, and lots of stuff going on in my life. I digress, this is probably the wrong place to talk about my life rants.

 

Changes changes changes - here's some updates on the changes made.

 

RSS Feeder

Before they were just links to the individual tutorials, which wasn't all that great (it's historical, they were like this when I took over this site). But now tutorials can be directly fed right to your reader - so hopefully this convenience will encourage more of our regular visitors to suscribe. To be honest, I'm quite surprised about the low number of suscribers, and I've attributed it to the poor function of the feeds. Or maybe people are not aware of the changes to the feeds. Or, perhaps, the tutorials are not feedworthy? (gasp!) D: Currently, the feeder spits out the last 10 tutorials, so the feed becomes quite lengthy. I woudln't change this until somebody thinks this is a problem so, if anybody has suggestions on how to improve the feeds please let me know.

 

Comment System

The new system has been tested and launched - which I'm very excited about. We receive new e-mails every now and then about the tutorials, but I encourage everyone to discuss directly in the tutorial page for all to see. I do realize some tutorial instructions are not so clear, so raising it in the comments section helps those that run into the same problem. Note that the comment system is designed to monitered for spam and bots, so please keep comments (reasonably) clean and be respectful towards the writers. There's a feature designed to ban IP's, and I wouldn't mind testing it, if somebody would like to try it out ;)

 

Advertising

And here's the part everybody looks at me and shakes their head. Much to everyone's disbelief, we're not really guys in suits, smoking our cigars while we reel in the dough. :\ This is a project we work on in our spare time, and we're just regular t-shirt and jeans guys, trying to make ends meet so try to be gentle when we're asking for money. The (really ugly) Google Adsense slots have been modified to be less of a pain in the ass for our visitors. Believe me, if I could, I would take those out completely - but it's all I have to rely on to pay our writers. People complain that some tutorials are down right crap, which, I don't think is too far from the truth. But I understand that our writers are capable of more if we can provide more so it's not at all their fault. Yet, they can still manage to pull some really amazing stuff, which I really appreciate their doing. Really, it's a vicious cycle, and the sooner I break out of it, the more we can afford to hire to pay for the absolute top-quality tutorials. Bear with me here.

 

For those that may be interested in being our Sponsor, I've just updated the statistics for June(with a comparison with May). Not only will you help the community, as we can provide more tutorials, we'll also provide you with some decent traffic!

 

That should be it for now, more changes are coming your way.. stay tuned.

 

Happy learning!

 

-- John, Site Admin