As of yesterday, most of the ‘static content’ on BlenderNation (images, CSS and Javascript files), is no longer served from our own webserver. Instead, we’re now using a ‘Content Delivery Network’. They have over 500 servers worldwide and automatically choose a server near you to get you the files.
It should speed up the website quite a bit, but it also costs quite a few dollars per month to run. So I’d like to ask you: did you notice any change in loading speed? Should we keep this?
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!
Yes! How’s that for you, you ’1st post!’ shouting kiddies! Jamez here knows how to do it properly – he just posted the 60,000th comment on BlenderNation. Well done Jamez! As a reward, take your pick from the blender.org e-shop mail me (bart@ this site) and I’ll send it your way.
We had a friendly visitor from Hong Kong this morning who was downloading thousands of pages from BlenderNation, causing our server to crash. I’m not sure why people would try to do this, but please rest assured that this will earn you an instant and permanent place in the BlenderNation Naughty Corner (also known as an IP-ban ;-).
We’re looking into technical measures to automatically prevent this and add these people to our blacklist. Any tips doing this with WordPress or Apache would be much appreciated!
We’ve measured that our readers are getting a shorter attention span – most articles aren’t fully read anymore and people just click the links. Without a doubt, much of this can be attributed to consumption of new media such as Facebook and Twitter.
As of today, we will be adjusting our publication policy to our audience and move away from publishing longer articles – BlenderNation will now exist purely as short messages on Twitter. Accordingly, we have adapted our website to now display the latest Tweets only.
Our news articles will now be published @BlenderNation, and we have created a list @BlenderNation/Community that will include other interesting Twitter streams from the Blender community. If you haven’t already, just sign up to twitter and follow us.
For the editors, this moves makes it MUCH easier to quickly post Blender news. I’m sure this will mean an increased news flow. Twitter FTW!
Update: yeah that’s right – April 1st is over now ;-)
As you can read in my previous post, I consider the ‘YourNews’ experiment a bit of a failure. Like most people here, I missed the old site. So, as of today, we’re back! Please submit your news through our good old contact form again – our inbox is rather empty at the moment :)
I launched BlenderNation ‘YourNews’ a few days after Christmas. It was an experiment to see if a new approach to Blender community news was viable. After about three weeks, I have very mixed feelings about it and I think it’s time to make a decision on the future of BlenderNation. I’m asking for everyone’s advice on how to proceed.
Hi all!
Maintaining BlenderNation takes a lot of time and energy, and I’ve decided to take a short break from writing new articles this week. I won’t leave you without your daily dose of Blender news though, but this week YOU will be responsible for writing and publishing news.
Users of ‘Digg’ will be familiar with the concept: you submit your own news (with an image if you like) and let other readers ‘vote’ your article up. If enough people like it, it’ll appear on the homepage. Check it out: BlenderNation Your News.
This is also the first time that we’ll be showing our new logo, designed by Virgilio Vasconcelos!
I hope you’re all having a great time with your family and friends today (and tomorrow, for some people). While you’re still enjoying that warm and fuzzy feeling, I’d like you to take a look at the BlenderNation team on Kiva. We’re helping less fortunate people by providing them with micro-credits. To date, 34 people have lend out a total of $4,475. I’d love to be able to add a zero to that next year ;-)
Read more about how to join us in our previous announcement. Thanks!!
I’m happy to announce a new service: BlenderNation Community News. BNCS automatically collects news from the most important Blender community sites, and displays it as a regular news blog.
I’m still testing the waters with this feature; better integration with the rest of the site will follow later. For now, you can access it through the menu at the top of your screen. Feedback is more than welcome of course!
If you’d like us to consider adding your website here, please check our criteria and contact us.
