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Blend Swap Needs Help

21

Blend Swap is in a difficult situation now as their long-time developer Jonathan can no longer spend time on the project, and without him the project may not be able to continue. They're looking for someone with relevant Infrastucture/Backend/Frontend skills to help.

Matthew Muldoon writes:

As many of you may have noticed over the past few months the site has become more and more unresponsive and unreliable. This is because our long-time developer Jonathan got an amazing opportunity for a job and no longer has the time to devote to Blend Swap. So we've been without a developer for a while, I was hoping that I'd be able to find a replacement quick enough that no one would ever notice. However, that hasn't been the situation.

Blend Swap does not make a lot of money so we are unable to hire a developer at their full rate, we really need to find someone that would be flexible and willing to work with us. This has been a struggle. So I'm asking for the communitys help. We need a CakePHP developer desperately, if you have experience and are willing to work out a payment arrangement please get in touch with us at matthew[@]blendswap.com

If we're unable to find a developer that'll work with us, I'm not sure what the future will hold for the site, thank you all for your time and help.

Read the requirements for this position on Blend Swap.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
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.

21 Comments

  1. blend swap error when downloaded. name.zip.html
    i had rename delete back name .html and still error when extract the .zip files.
    something wrong with blend swap. please fix the blend swap.
    thx u.

  2. I had the same problem, and reported it to them (with as much info as I could give). Hopefully they'll be axle to fix it soon.

    I could open the files after I removed the first part (containg HTML etc, up until the Zip header that starts with PK) of the zip-files. You might try it yourself, but it's best done with hex editor (a text editor might work, but could also mess the file up more..)

    • No need for all that if you're on Windows -- in the save dialog, remove the ".html" portion of the filename, then in the File Type dropdown, select "All Files" (rather than html) and click save. Should now open as a regular zip file.

      • Safteyman:
        No, just renaming the files and trying to open them gives an error, from both Windows Explorer and 7-zip, saying that it's not a valid zip-file: https://ibin.co/46AFgNFp9zDb.png

        There's some error messages (from CakePHP) tacked on to the beginning of the files, formatted as HTML: https://ibin.co/46AFxXuxmgMR.png
        That part (upto the letters PK) has to be removed to be able to open the files.

        Removing it using Notepad++ worked fine (but for some reason, it doesn't work when I used Atom [maybe it saves the file with UTF-8!?]), using the normal Windows Notepad is a bad idea (it can't handle big files, or files with "strange encoding")

        • I don't rename it AFTER downloading... remove the .html in the save dialog, change to "All files" then hit the download button. That's what worked for me.

          • Glad it worked for you..
            I tried that as well, but the files I saved like that didn't open either.. (Have tried w/ both Chrome and Firefox)

            Logically (and technically) there shouldn't be a difference between changing the extension when saving the file in your browser, the browser just takes the data it gets from the server and saves it to a file: it could be a text file that you choose to save with .jpg or a MP3 that gets a .pdf extension and the browser wouldn't care and just save the data to the filename it gets.

            It's almost like we're experiencing two different problems!?

            The only way I found (for what I've downloaded, no matter how I saved it) was to remove the extra data from the beginning of the files.

            /Former web developer (I've had similar problems on webapps I've worked on)

  3. That is unfortunate. But they chose to run the site as a commercial project, limiting downloads according to membership status, so they have to abide by commercial rules. I could imagine their function being taken up by the Blender Cloud.

    I hope they publish their files as a torrent or something before they shut down.

  4. Yes it works, thank you to Safetyman, you need software:
    7zip (freeware)
    browser: Chrome or Firefox or Opera (All freeware)
    i am use Chrome browser =
    1.log in to blendswap
    2.example: search mustang, click mustang car
    3.left click in download button
    4.Yes Download now button will show it, do not left click
    5.Right click on Yes Download Now button
    6.choose Save link as
    7.Save menu will show:
    - File name: 80260_1969_ford_mustang_boss_429.zip.html
    Rename it to: 80260_1969_ford_mustang_boss_429.7zip
    - Save as type: All files

  5. Hi there,

    Can you please give more details on blendswap site's technology stack? The database, data import-export options, any third-party tools to manage subscriptions etc..

    I believe I can help you to some extend.

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