So, did you win the contest?
Dec 07, 2008 — 3 comments
Happened to notice anything different upon your latest visit to this site? Good. We've finally released the long-anticipated sixth version.
This has been in the works for quite some time. I know I started sketching new looks and thinking about what should be changed starting somewhere around early 2008. It had to take a backseat to a few more pressing cornerstones in my life (graduating from college, moving across the country, and starting my "real" career), but I'm pleased to say that I'm extremely happy that this is finally out and public.
There's plenty in store for Good-Tutorials yet. Now that v6 is out the door, I'm going to be fixing the inevitable bugs that spring up after this release, and then I'm going to dive right into v6.1, which I'm planning to add some really cool functionality that I've been wanting to add for quite some time. So, even though this is the culmination of months of work, trust me, there's plenty more on the way.
So, what's really in the new version? Yippee, a new layout, right? Naturally, there's way more to it than meets the eye. Here's a quick summary of some of the main additions in gtv6.
New in Version 6
- A hot, new layout.
- Big changes to advertising: fully automated (no more waiting for approval for your ads), better overview of the scheduling of your ads, history support, and more.
- Open moderation. Everyone can participate in choosing which tutorials are good enough to make Good-Tutorials. Moderators still play a very important part, but getting more people involved will be better for everybody.
- Search functionality has been improved, allowing for searches within a specific topic. Also has a cleaner URL structure to allow for easy bookmarking of searches.
- You can now use a gravatar with your account, which shows up on your tutorials and comments.
- Comments now use Markdown, so you can add links, code, formatting, and so on in your messages.
- Refined tutorial submission page. No more scrolling through all of the topics and categories to submit your tutorial.
- Updated tutorial listings — rate, save, and report tutorials with just one click now.
- User pages are much more refined and useful. You can see an activity stream of what you've done recently.
- Tutorial links now retain a :visited pseudo class so it's easier to see which tutorials you've seen already.
- Expanded sorting — you can now sort all tutorials by saves, rating, and so on rather than just seeing the top 25 of those areas.
- Additional anti-spam measures to make sure the site isn't flooded with crap.
- Added account activation, so you can (finally!) have a way to reset your password if you've forgotten it.
- Implements OpenSearch, which lets you search Good-Tutorials from the comfort of your (IE7 or Firefox 2+) browser.
I hope you're as excited about the new Good-Tutorials as I am. I would absolutely love to hear your questions and feedback in the comments section below; I know there's a lot of new-ness here, a lot of change, and there's inevitably going to be something that doesn't work out and will have to be updated, so the more friendly feedback I can get, the faster that can get done. And if you do find any bugs or have any specific feedback on a specific area or problem you're facing, please feel free to take a quick trip to the new Good-Tutorials Lighthouse, where I'll be tracking bugs and feature requests as they come in.
Thanks, and I greatly look forward to chatting with each and every one of you in the comments.
Such a great layout!! thanks for keeping up the site for us. =) greets from mexico
@Chris... it was a bit of a work weekend for me. Had somewhere like 30-40 commits to my repository in the last 24 hours or so, so hopefully that means that things should be pretty smooth all around today [crosses fingers].
Hi, can you show an example where will be "Image ads 240x90 images (JPG, PNG, or GIF) that appear in the ad bar above on every single page"? Thanks.
@eyeson - that's currently the ad left of the 728 skyscraper above. Right now it's a black image to Tutorial9 ("Master Photoshop and Definite Yourself").
Thank you. Another question. Today I bought featured for 4 days for Adobe Photoshop category and it show that ads will be displayed from Mar 01, 2009 till Mar 05, 2009. It's true?
Nope; I noticed that just now... I'll be fixing it shortly.
And maybe this is bug: When I try to read in google reader your feeds, then I get message "Definitely not found." for all feeds. For example: http://www.good-tutorials.com/tutorial/31755/6-easy-ways-to-improve-your-html-emails
Actually, I take that back; it looks like I'm booked until then for the Photoshop topic. I'll add in a "next available date" during that process so it's more clear.
I'll look into the feed reader error, too. And I'll likely just bump your Photoshop orders to the front page since it wasn't clear up-front. Sorry about that.
RSS should be fixed for the main Feedburner feed now. PayPal orders have been fixed, too, and I've added a "waitlist" indicator on featured tutorial orders.
Nice! Working Good :).
wow, this is much better and cleaner look. Kudos for the work.
Ha! how much do you charge for the ads now :-) I might want to advertise on good-tutorial in near future
is there a way to see pending tutorials in your account still?
When I rate tutorials in "Mind lending a hand", they must be not show up for me after they was rated?
It looks really nice and neat thanks for taking the time to make it better for us all. :)
@freddywang - You can get a feeling for advertising prices by going to the ads page. I'll likely need to better explain some of these at some point, though, so maybe in the future I'll add one page that sort of lists everything at once rather than going to multiple pages.
@pepper - No. I mean, they should show up in your account, but there's not a way to easily see whether or not they've been added. I've added a ticket for this on Lighthouse; it'll get fixed at some point soon. You can track the status on Lighthouse if you want.
@ciaika - That's something that got reverted at the last minute to get a little bit of a "safer" launch. After the current bug on tutorial submission (use Safari for the time being for that!), it's probably my number #2 priority bug. Ratings still go through, but it's just that they keep those rated tutorials visibile in the upcoming queue. You can track the status on Lighthouse if you want.
I love the new layout! Everything is easy to find and is well organised. Good job Zach :)
Blaz
you should post up some screens of all 6 versions to see each design get better and better :)
Some of the bigger changes for the day:
- Tutorial submit now should work for all browsers
- Bunch of optimizations to make it run faster. Likely not "there" yet, but it's a start. I know it's been sluggish as of late, and I'll be working hard to make it snappy in this new version.
@shadex - thanks :)
@Pepper - That's a cool idea; I might do that at some point. There'll be more regular blog posts from this point out, particularly in the coming weeks as things really start happening with the new launch.
Zach, you could always make a tutorial out of how you updated your web site layout. I did that in a four part tutorial on how I made my blog design. Just a thought.
WOW! Zach,you have out done yourself.
Very cool, good job.
Hey Zach, remember me :D?
Anyhow, havent been on gt for along time, and just came back and i was like wtf!!! :o
Awesome theme, love it, my favourite theme yet, except i think it was v3/4 i kinda miss the menu - great work
Whats even more awesome is the adverts arent distracting :)
Nice! Wasn't expecting it so quickly after you started beta testing.... guess you've been really hard at work.