HELP WANTED, Inquire within.
With Bart on his much needed sabbatical, I will be stepping in to help keep BlenderNation running. However, I do not have the time to write articles everyday and would like your assistance. It was Bart’s goal to give you at least two or more articles per day, but the reality is that this is an unpaid job, so while there are several Writers “on staff”, family and job commitments come first and the contribution of articles is therefor sporadic, thus putting pressure on Bart.
So where do you the reader come in to help out?
We get some great suggestions for articles daily but the problem is that typically, all we get, is a short, and if were lucky, one sentence description and a link or two. So many article suggestions go to the wayside because we don’t have enough information or time to write something about it.
So I’m going to try the following experiment. Please continue to send your suggestions for articles, and when you do, try to write it as if it’s an article, give us something that can go right to print. I’ll edit it if I feel it’s needed for clarification, copy and paste it and then give you credit for the article as well.
It doesn’t have to be long, just give me enough information that will make sense to the readers. Please double check your facts and make sure the links are working too . Also let me know how you want your name to appear. [edit] We also like to have a picture for the article, like you see on the front page. Just make sure that it is not copy write restricted.
Hopefully, with the community’s assistance, we can continue to help advance the Blender experience and give you great information along the way.
Sincerely,
Tim Formica
[edit] 05-16-08 1016
* Some readers have said they submitted an article that never got published. I apologize if this is the case. Please resubmit your article and I will do what I can to to publish it.
* Bart just sent me a list of people who answered his call for writers. I will try to review these over the weekend and get back to you ASAP.
What kind of word count are you looking for?
I send few times information and it was never published.
So I am not sure if there was a problem with the system
you use or if there was a personal interest in not presenting it.
I could write short articles from my work area but I am not
going to do this when they are not used. I think this makes sense.
Most of those articles than would be focused about Blender in
industrial design and related areas.
John,
Enough words to convey to the reader, just look through past aricles and that should give you an idea of what is needed.
class – sorry, yes, there have been a number of articles that haven’t been published in the past. I’ll do my best to change that from here on out.
Well I did send you some news some time ago.
I was very disappointed to see that you haven’t published them yet.
So I’ve stopped looking.
Yes, imagine you’re writing a forum post to the blender community in bklenderartists.org. :
This should be easy.
Maybe you should do what the Garry’s Mod Site Does. Every user signed up for the site can submit an article and then Garry goes in and approves or Disapproves the article.
Yes I second Anthony_C
I don’t know about WordPress or whatever this site uses, but [Spip->http://www.spip.net/%5D
has that kind of workflow.
@Anthoni: yeah that would bee cool
Example sites:
http://www.n4g.com
http://www.slashdot.org
Ali and Anthoni_C,
Looks interesting, I’ll check it out and discuss it with Bart
Maxim, sorry, if you are willing to resubmit it, I’ll try to publish it.
Tim that’s how we work at our magazine (where I work) as well, appart from editorials we only write the odd article ourselves. Most of them are submitted by outsiders.
How does your contact section work though? It seems a bit … dunno how to put it … maybe it would be good to have a contact section for say different aspects of Blendernation.org, and include e-mail adresses of individuals who we can submit info to directly. I sent a message a couple of days ago, although my message was rather vague I suppose, so I don’t blame anyone for not coming back to me yet, no worries. (Especially with everything that’s been going on here)
PS: Tim I might get into contact to you sometime soon about something, I know someone with your direct e-mail address :)
However, even though our articles are submitted by outsiders we still edit them and approve what goes in of course. :)
I wouldn’t like to see Blendernation become some random blog where it’s almost an anything goes scenario. I good amount of control and editorial decision-making needs to persist I think. Basically what Bart’s been doing all along. Otherwise Blendernation will lose its credibility and go down the bog.
Count on me , if i see something interestng i’ll post it to you and write a small article !
Tim,
Thanks for taking over for Bart. He has done a fine job and I know you have also in the recent past. That said. I don’t know if you have access to the information that I sent to Bart a few days ago regarding the Blender Classes and Conference coming up here in Tennessee, USA. Because there is a discount for early registration to these I wanted to be sure the information to get out there . If you don’t have that I will be glad to resend it. If anyone reading this is interested in attending please email me at [email protected]. Thanks again, to both you and Bart.
Byron
Byron,
I got it, thanks. I’ll post it tonight. I’m in in the Los Angles, California area which is GMT -8.
Thanks Tim!
the main trouble for me is that i m french, and writing article in english will be a bit to hard…
neverthless i will enjoy to help.
@dagobert: The editors will revise your article and correct mistakes as they read it :)
The only thing for now that i can do is ,
give some ideas for it .
Like i did before about the help search and all…
And it should not be limited ,
if something can be done it must ,to then later
try for bring the same feature to the others .
“”designed to run cross platform with features equally supported for all users!””
If something are needed and someone want to create ,
Blender must be able to do and not limited .
Its only a program not people ,theres no rich or poor ,
but only what its able to create .
It’s based on FREE ,and OpenSource ,
But the most important is that It’s Blender .
I’m on it!
Just one question: Um, where are we supposed to find the latest scoop on blender happenings :D
if not here; I haven’t a clue
Offering help-
Hi Editors, I am willing to invest some of my time into the blender community. I could for example prepare articles for publishing. However, if you are interested just email me at [email protected].
Yt,
Gunnar
I am willing to help. I can review tutorials, write/re-write articles, whatever you want. [email protected]
Would it be at all possible to have somewhere on the site a list of all of the suggested articles that have been submitted? Whilst I’m sure there are alot of people who would love to help out this excellent site by writing a couple of articles here and there; it is difficult to find different subjects to write about. If it is possible to do this it would probably need some sort of tagging system where a user can say “yes I am writing this article” to avoid duplicates.
I hope you take this into consideration.
BlenderLovingSquirrel2
To quote a 49’r from the California gold rush… Gold is where you find it…”
Cguy – I’ll add you to the list of potential writers.
Moley – unfortunately it’s too difficult to maintain that type of system. When it comes down to it, it’s up to the writer to scan for previous articles, but no one has the time to do that which is why we sometimes run the same article by two different writers.
okay I’ll scan CGtalk, Crymod, GameArtists, Deviantart, in particular because these are the places I’m familiar with anyway
along with teh random Youtube searching and Foreign language searching – Peru and Brazil are blender “gold” hahahahahahahahahah
okay bye
I would love to help. Looks like you have a lot of offers already though.
Give Bart my best.
Cheers.
I’ll be introducing a small class of “new media journalism” majors to Blender3D this fall. For most of them, it will be their first experience with any kind of 3D tool, and they are writers rather than designers, so the experience will likely be memorable for them. If you’d like some personal accounts from newbies, they would probably welcome the opportunity to be published. Let me know if you’re interested.
Regarding the suggestions about having users be able to submit articles and have a moderator approve them and publish them, I think that would be a great idea.
I’m not sure what the backend that blendernation.com runs on, but I certainly know that a CMS like Joomla or Drupal (both open source and free) could very easily give you the ability to have users post articles and moderators approve and publish them. I have set this up before and I would be happy to help in this area if any assistance is needed.
Also, a CMS like Joomla has a very nice templating system, so making it look like BlenderNation is now is very viable/doable.
Kind regards,
Socceroos
I’ve been interested in helping out here for a while, but haven’t had the time until now.
I finished close to the top of my English class last year (which was the highest level English class available), and I could see this as a good application of everything I’ve learnt.
Plus Blender has been a very important part of my life for years now!
So if you need a new writer id be very happy to help, feel free to add me to the list and email me at [email protected]
Regards, Alex
Socceroos,
Yes, this sounds promising as well as the other similar suggestions. The main thing we need to keep in mind is that we don’t want to lose past articles which are in the WordPress database. So any suggestion about compatibility would be appreciated and Bart and I will review them.
Thanks to all for your suggestions and keep them coming!
I am definitely interested in becoming a writer. I have submitted an article, but it was mostly links to videos. I can try to lessen the link list and add a better description, but overall it was pretty good. (except the video selections weren’t supreme.) Am I on that list of writers? ;D If not, please put me on it.
btw, thanks for the info on how the article should be written. ;D It was helpful.
I’ve been interested in helping out here and becoming a writer for BlenderNation for a while, but haven’t had the time until now.
I finished close to the top of my English class last year (which was the highest level English class available), and I could see this as a good application of everything I’ve learnt.
And of course Blender has been a very important part of my life for years now!
So if you need a new writer I’d be very happy to help, feel free to add me to the list and/or email me at [email protected]
Regards, Alex
@Tim: where do we host our article thumbnail images? We can’t upload to BlenderNation.com till we have an author account/privileges. Use DeviantART?
I can write an article on using the Decimate feature. I utilized this feature with a high polygon “christmas tree” to facilitate decorating a tree with lights. Using the Decimate feature, I was able to create halo textures assigned to vertices left over after a decimate. I repeated this process for differing color of lights. Any interest in an article?
UPDATE:
Bart has set up a system where we can add contributors. I’m still working on the guidelines for you and will try to have them ready for those who expressed and interest in writing by Monday
Tim
It will be a better choice if we look and follow what you have suggested here.