In the same week as our 60,000th comment, we reach another milestone: our 3,000th article (this one). In just a little over 5 years, this site has grown from a hobby experiment to a regular part of my life. When I was first amazed at just 400 readers, we now have over 13,000 unique visitors every day - and well over 1 Million pageviews per month!
BlenderNation is the biggest and longest running project in my life, and I'm extremely proud of what we have achieved so far.
Now that we're approaching our 5th anniversary, it's time though to reconsider some things about this site. First of all, I think it badly needs a facelift. The current site started as a 'K2' WordPress theme and it has been patched time after time. Right now, it's become an insane mess of images and links and it can use a cleanup ;-) I'll be asking your input on several aspects soon.
Also, I'm trying to start working with freelance writers to assure a more steady newsflow. I've always had help from a small army of volunteer writers, but more and more often I find that at the end of the day, writing the daily posts is something I do on my own. We're also receiving much more news than I can handle by myself, and I've disappointed plenty of people in the past. I guess we can easily fill over 5 good news articles per day at this moment, and this number is increasing fast. I also hope that hiring some help will offload me from some work - running BlenderNation currently takes between 1 and 2 hours of work every day!
The way I see it, BlenderNation is getting ready for the next step, and we'll certainly be around for another 3,000 articles on Blender's amazing development (but we might just reach that number a little faster than in 5 years!).
44 Comments
Hey Bart, you do a very good job - THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR COMMITMENT !!!
I'd like to echo Stefan's comment. Bart, you've been a veritable champion of the Blender community. My hat is off to you sir!
Thank you for providing me with such a wonderful news source and insight in to the latest happenings of the Blender community. I'd also like to give a shout for all those little helpers who submit stories and filter through content - you're awesome too!
Plus, 13,000 unique visitors every day?? That's impressive!
Huge congrats to Bart and everyone else who has contributed to BlenderNation over the years!
Blender deserved it,
It is indeed an incredible piece of Software.
Long life ot Blender ,BlenderNation and to the Blender Army.
Thanks 3000 times Bart, you became a companion of so many Blender users, seems you should get 13 000 THANK YOUs by the end of the day. .-)
great job! congratulations!
i'm looking forward to the next 3000 articles!
Hi Bart ! Congratulations and Thank you for your great work on this site.
It is the first and sometimes the only website that I visit every day.
I have alway found it interesting, and its current appearance is convenient for me.
Thanks again and long life to Blendernation and Blender !
...and still not a favicon or a proper commenting system :P
lol
I'm the one who visits blendernation 1,000 times a day ;)
@Dread Knight
What a shame :)
A website about 3D and design and gaming and so on without a favicon ;)
@Dread Knight: I did mention I was working on a redesign, wasn't I? It'll be part of it. And as far as the commenting system is concerned: you're the only one who has ever complained about it, so as far as I'm concerned it's not under discussion.
congrats! for me, the interesting thing is the articles content... rest is just make up :)
Well done mate! Keep it up!
13000? Wow, really no wonder that the BN effect is that deadly for other sites. If only a fraction visits the pages, linked to from here, most servers used to 100 or so unique visitors per day will die immediatedely :D
Yup, a face lift wouldn't be bad :) Maybe finally something blenderish. (But please not the Blender UI theme for, was it Facebook? That one looked horrible, lol)
Hmm... For some reason, the Edit option doesn't work for me anymore... it keeps loading the comment and never actually shows it.
Anyway, I just wanted to add: Congrats :D
@Bart: looking forward to the redesign. About the commenting system... take a look at how conversations go at OMG! Ubuntu: people get to log in nice and easy and identify, they get reputation points from having their comments and replies thumbed up, they get notified via email when someone replies to their comments... they can have their comments and such appear on social networks, they have some nice web 2.0 profiles so you can get to know some of the people better and all the comments are back-ed up in-the-cloud as well.
It's really lame to have to check back an article manually and look around to see if someone replied to a comment I've made... it's so 80's. If others didn't complain, that doesn't mean DISQUS.com would be a bad choice for this website.
Anyway, I'll stop complaining now, I'm tired of it. Do as you wish.
@Dread Knight: Yes, I agree - that's why we have the the 'subscribe to comment' system that sends out email notifications when a new reply appears. It's been here for years ;-) Maybe I'll need to make it more prominent?
About scorings points etc - I don't much care for that, to be honest, but I'll ask how people feel about such features before I start the redesign. I'll give Disqus a fair chance.
Congrats. I really like BlenderNation. It was a super idea to start with and maintained very well.
Some new features are not as strong as the original idea, but the wish to keep it fresh is good.
Thanks for all your hard work Bart and team, its very much appriciated.
@bart
The reason why you have alot of hits and page views is that people with higher and lower bandwidth find it easy to access the current theme and the site design is very simple and elegant .optimized for fast loading .
just like more people use google than yahoo for its simplicity and speed
i hope you dont screw up the site when you redesign it .....
Hi Bart!!
I still remember you from the old days and wanted to say that you do deserve the hugest congratulations from me for the growth you had with your infamous BlenderNation!!! Good and bad (yup, I was there as a lurker) days definitely count... else it wouldn't be here today! ;)
I appreciate your dedication and hard work in maintaining this site and wish to express my gratefulness in respect of your successful "hobby" experiment! :) Good work and I'm lookin' forward to the new design.. hopefully as good and simple! ;-)
P.S. Although I'm not really an active blenderhead like I was anymore, I still am very intrigued by Blender's progress and how it got to this point nowadays.. that amazes me since I recall the days of no ray-tracing. ;) And someday I hope to use it again both as a hobby and professionally and this site is great for keeping my head up! ;)
@COOLNESS
Nope it's just awesome
Congratulations, Bart and the BlenderNation team. I love this site.
Congrats Bart! Averaging 7-14 hours a week over 5 years is a huge commitment. When I think of Blender, the first three sites that come to mind are blender.org, blenderartists.org, and blendernation.com :-)
Longue vie à Blendernation,
Vive le Roi
Vive Bart
Pour que Vive Blender...
congrats Bart. I visit blendernation everyday.
Thanks for the effort put in - it has been fun watching from the side line
I love this site and am so thankful for everything you do! Keep going strong!
Congratulations Bart! and big THANKS for all the work you've done, keeping us up-to-date with Blender news :D This is a place check every day (and it's now a bit more special to me, one of my tutorials was featured here, it's a first...ok, I had submitted an article, but still... :D)
BlenderNation will continue to steam ahead for many years :D GO BART!
Congratulations, Bart! This is a great site and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes from here. Lot's of interesting possibilities!
Congratulations!
I think I can remember a time before BlenderNation existed... vaguely and it's been arguably the biggest and most important change in the community since you started it. It binds the community together. It's the definitive Blender News source.
And I think it may also be the site I've had in my RSS Reader the longest. Just keep doing what you're doing Bart, great job from day one.
w00t Bart! This site has become something very great, and has really helped me realize just how many amazing things have been going on with blender! I do agree that a facelift is a good idea, but I also have been somewhat enjoying the simplicity of this site. Please don't give me a huge page to download, but don't be afraid to do something new!
@Dark Knight, @Bart: grrr....so I typed up much of this before and then the site said "possible imposter" and I lost it lol....anyway, now that I'm registered: I visited the OMG! Ubuntu site, mostly because I was curious to see if they also allowed "guest" comments (was happy to see that they do). Most of the features, though "cutting edge" (if social network connectrivity is still considered cutting edge) seem like they would be a bit of an overkill on BN. If there were interest in profiles, it doesn't seem like those should be too hard to implement (though this is coming from a simple-minded end user xD). One thing I do think would be helpful pertaining to comments (and Dark Knight alluded to this), is the possibility to receive notification only when someone replies to *your* comment(s). Just some things to consider, I guess. Anyways, great job with BN so far, Bart!
@PCChris et-al
"pertaining to comments"
Just comment to the article and stay away from forumish discussions adds to the friendly tone of the site. In my view it's a big misconception to think everybody want to read personal discussions on news sites.
I visit Blendernation everyday everyweek... It's the first site I visit everytime I turn on my PC.
You're probably one of the most important BlenderHeads and it's very important you can keep this blog going on without going crazy. If I will have some news be sure I'll write an article for you and I hope everyone is going to help.
Good Luck and thank you very much
super duper! :) ....
Congrats Bart. I reflects Giovanni's actions. I visited Blendernation everyday, every week. My favourite site ever!
Congratulations and thank you Bart and BN Team!
It really, reall hard to keep posting articles everyday...
Congratulations, Bart!
As for Dread Knight's comment, I don't want Blender Nation to become a Facebook-clone, and I'm glad other people don't come up with such ideas. All those bells and whistles would only get in the way of what's most important, i.e. the content. I don't think we need a comments tree, where you can comment a comment on somebody else's comment, or give them marks or "thums-down". That would be ridiculous.
@Dread Knight: People didn't have comments in the 80's. People didn't have the Internet in the 80's - at least not regular people.
Great to see Bart
Im glad to be one whos contributed to this site, sorry Ive been so quiet this year however, but dont worry Im still here and hope to get back to writing articles in the near future.
Looking forward to seeing the much needed facelift as well :)
-Alex
That mean every day on average you've posted
1.643835616 articles.
You've done an amazing job, Bart. Blender has gained a ton from this site's existence.
I'm looking forward to the next 3000 articles. :)
I can't find a good place to put this question so I will just try it here -- has anyone else noticed that only the first level of toggle-tags in the "Blendernation Links" page still functions? By which I mean, the first level shows the following:
==================
What are you looking for?
* Type
o Books [12]
o Materials [17]
o Models [37]
o Textures [4]
o Tutorials [244]
==================
Clicking one of those will expand all the sublevels out, but trying to toggle on one of the sublevels causes them all to collapse again. Can someone confirm?
@Bart I don't care about ALL comments, I only care about the ones addressed to me.
So the "Notify me of followup comments via e-mail" is pretty useless.
Cool :D Thanks for all of them and waiting for more :)
Thank you Bart for all your hard work on this wonderful site. It is the first place I go when I log on and the last place I visit before I log off. You have given the Blender community a great and useful gift.
@DreadKnightFFS: we tried nested comments for a while, about a year ago. It turned the entire discussion into an awful mess. Nested discussions work very well on a forum, but not on (this?) blog.