I recently changed the layout on BlenderNation. One of the things that I really love about it is the podium for Blender artists: the daily header graphic (check out the header archive, or submit your art here). What else should I do to support you? An accurate list of upcoming events? A map of Blender users? Free lunch on Fridays? What would you like?
You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.
About the Author
Bart Veldhuizen
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
36 Comments
the old community news tab that automatically gathered new posts on websites like blendercookie, blendernewbies, tube, blender.org, farshtary's blog...etc.
now i have no idea what they are posting and have to check it manually...:(
you can use Learning Blender 2.5 page on Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/LearningBlender2.5 ) that agregates a lot of blender news
Ah, good point! I'll put that on my todo list, thanks.
Use a Google Alert
No more Helvetica, use a more original design, please. I see the twenty-eleven themes a bajillion times already.
you gotta love Helvetica dude!
a map of blender users would be very nice.
Already got one, don't we... someone set it up on Googlemaps last year.
yeah i believe so, but it should be somehow embeded in blender nation and easy to access and register more people
See my reply below - the current map is manually maintained and unreliable. I think we need a better solution.
How about two daily header graphics:) Or three, one on the left, one on top and one on the right. Triple the love!
Honestly, that's a tough question as you already do such an awesome work for us.
Still, free lunch sounds good too;)
Keep it coming - appreciated!
well, I don't use it much, but I second wysiwyg's note... other than that, I love the new look! might even submit some stuff to the banner, now that I know it's user-generated (kind-of)... ;)
The Map!!!
http://maps.google.com.au/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=201562725129812092684.00049cc796fb84c0c42ca
From this BA thread
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?209333-Where-are-the-Worlds-Blender-Users
I know there's a google map, but I've found it's unreliable and manually maintained (my own registration disappeared after a few weeks, for example). How about I let people set their location in their profile on this website and I use that to draw a map?
Free lunch sounds good Bart!
You're doing fantastic work here, Bart. Thank you for providing Blender artists and enthusiasts with a place to gather and see what the community is up to!
Perhaps an idea would be to have a weekend-warrior project/tutorial...something meatier than just a button-jog.
(of course there are plenty of fresh tutorials posted anyway)
I'm planning on doing that hoar-frost tutorial this weekend...so that's my idea: keep doing what you're doing : )
A community chat would be awesome I think. Sometimes during the day people have some free time and connecting with people that use Blender would be a plus for everyone. Maybe even embed an irc chat on this website.
I think a lot of users are active in irc-channels. So I think just an embed chat would be useful.
"community chat" I like that idea as well. You could watch in on hot topics and maybe chime in when you need help or offer help to others.
other than that you do an awesome job already Bart, thanks! I love reading the Friday night hangout.
Outright remove the "You might also like" section after articles. It tends to be outdated/unrelated.
I'd love to hear more about what the Freestyle Render guy/s are up to. They're pretty awesome and responsive to the community. More "outreach" to existing projects would be good too, if you could have someone on board whose job would be to maintain contact with developers and try to keep us updated on important milestones that go unrecorded due to them being little things in the eyes of the developers.
Overall, I think you fill the niche you have very well as reporter on general Blender news. I think this might be one of the defining differences between Blender and other open source graphics projects like GIMP. You are integrated into the main page of Blender, getting easy exposure to yourself, showing how thriving the Blender community is to anyone who happens to stroll by. While credit is due elsewhere of course, I earnestly believe that this website is the branch by which the Blender community grows and connects, so congrats on this achievement Bart. :)
I don't think the "You might also like"-section should be removed even if the points about it are true. Thanks to it I've stumbled upon some old but pretty cool stuff that I had somehow missed.
To each their own of course. :)
I got a lot of 2.49 and older links that I did not find useful or related to my interests, but I am sure others have differing views.
Yes, that's why I have that section. Finding 'related' comment is quite a hard task though, I'm currently using an external service called 'nrelate' that works ok-ish, but not perfect. If people have suggestions how to improve on this, I'd love to hear them.
Maybe add a thumbnail image of each topic to the Google gadget newsfeed.
Rather than posting all of the Blender user group meeting dates, why not have a Google Map with all the user groups posted allowing the user to locate groups nearby and contact them for dates
oh google maps is comercial. What about OpenStreetMaps ( leaflet). Further you could use a sytem like this [German] (Doku [German]) to load external scripts only when they are needed. This speeds the page loading process and overcomes security problems. Would be great for people with slow internet connection.
Free lunch, yo! Free lunch! )))
I love twenty-eleven (and twenty-ten too, for that ) :)
ops, meant as a reply to @99
if we can edit our posts THAT will be Awesome XD
for exemple, now I want to edit in:
if we can just edit our posts THAT will be Awesome XD
Just make sure nobody else can! Last time around, anybody could edit any posts by anyone.
Editing your comments should work, please let me know if there's a problem with it.
mmm... I don't see how ...
I make a test with disqus login... but you freak me out a bit with this new avatar
ok that's it, I can edit, sorry and thank you ;)
I'd hope so!
Oh, and I had changed back my avatar this morning but for some reason it doesn't take.. Oh well, it' still me ;-)