It’s a feature we introduced in the main v3 update (if I remember right) but I wasn’t a fan of it’s accessibility and the new update is a perfect chance to rethink the implementation of tutorial favorites.

Spring break is upon us and I know Nick is very hard at work trying to get as much done on v5 as possible before the hectic school schedule hits at full force again next week. Hopefully we can polish off the Publishing System and a few other loose ends and then finish up the newsletter and other bits. So yeah, I’m hounding him constantly and I need to start working on the new documentation and write-ups all this stuff is going to need.

Tonight I wanted to talk a little bit about the Faves system, which is the integrated bookmarking system allowing members to flag specific tutorials as “Faves” (favorites) and then easily call them up as needed. This was a long requested feature by MANY users who wanted an easy way to tag tutorials they would like to easily find later down the road, and with 22,171 current faves on the site, the system was obviously a welcomed addition. Despite it’s success, I always felt it was a bit clunky to use… marking tutorials as faves was easy enough, it was a single click on the faves icon. But recalling your faves list would force you to leave whatever page or search you were currently doing, and for those of you that had large fave lists, you had no way to really sort or search your faves.

Those days are OVA!

The new faves listing can now be called up with a single click without having to load a new page or leaving/screwing up your current search or form you were in the middle of filling out etc. The Faves list loads right on top of whatever you are working on for a quick glance with full paging, various sorting tools (you can sort by category, title or date) and even a built in keyword search for you fave addicts! Once you’re finished, click the close button and you’re right back to whatever page you were working on when you first accessed your faves list. And adding tutorials to your faves list is as easy as always, simply click the faves check-mark icon and it’s done!

So hope you guys dig the new faves setup. Before I click on spellcheck and then the publish button, I wanted to quickly touch on a great suggestion provided by Barry in the comments of my last P2L v5 Update post, where he suggests the following:

Just a quick idea. Have you thought about a has your tutorial been added to our tutorial index before feature? I’m not sure this would really be needed but it may reduce duplicate entries or 400 tutorials on how to make the date display on a page with php.

This is actually a fantastic suggestion that I have had in the back of my mind for a long time and will be something I bring up with Nick as a post-update release on the site. Currently the only duplicate checking we do on tutorials is URL based because of people resubmitting declined tutorials over and over again. I think having something that says “Hey we found tutorials with similar keywords in the title, is this a dupe?” would be a great idea, so thanks and we’ll definitely look in to that.

That’s it for me gang, have a great spring break! (yes I know some of you don’t start until next week or possibly the week after… consider this advanced well wishes) Please be sure to chare your comments by clicking on the comment button below, just try to keep it on topic *cough* Matt *cough*

Take care,
Dan

No matter what we add to the site and what goodies or features we introduce, our core business is tutorials and we will end where we started, submitting tutorials.

We’ve added quite a bit to the site over the years, but from day 1, we’ve been about the tutorials and finding the easiest ways to submit them. We’ve mentioned in the past that we were looking at an auto-submit API, and that is still a possibility, but we’ve had to shelve that for now while we work on other features. BUT what we did do was streamline the submission process for our most basic feature: submitting your tutorial links.

I think you’re really going to enjoy to changes we’ve added to this process overall… the submission process is basic, but it’s easily the most used feature on the site, so naturally tweaking this to even shave off seconds will amount to hours of saved time overall for the hundreds of webmasters that submit to our site. Here are some of the changes you will find with the new submission page:

Multiple Category Submissions

You will no longer have to submit your tutorials 1 category at a time… on the current system, you have to fill out and submit the form for each category you want to submit. So as an example, if you have 5 PHP tutorials and 5 Photoshop tutorials, you would have to fill out and submit the tutorials in 2 sessions… 1 for PHP and 1 for Photoshop. With the new system, you can submit all the categories in a single session.

No need for numbers!

You no longer need to worry about how many tutorials you are submitting.. you add each tutorial on-the-fly! So you fill out the form for your first entry, click add and it’s added to the submission list and you can fill in the next tutorial entry, or go ahead and complete the submission.

The Submission List

As you add tutorials to your submission session, the page maintains a submission list that is updated via AJAX as you add each tutorial. The list is gives you an instant preview of how your submission will look, and you can instantly edit or delete any tutorials in your submission list. Once you’ve added all the tutorials you want to submit, you can preview the entire list in the submission list, then go ahead and click Finish and the submission is processed.

Intelligent Form Processing

On top of the streamlined system, the submission form itself has some additional validation intelligence to help make your submissions easier and prevent submission errors. We often receive submissions with URL errors, so the site automatically validates your tutorial’s URL and alerts you if it is not valid when you add it to the submission list. You also won’t have to manually fill out your email address to receive the approval alerts, it will automatically fill it in for members based on your account email address, and from there you can change or opt to remove it if you wish.

So there’s a look at the new submission process for submitting your tutorial links, I hope you like the new improvements!

See you next post and keep those comments coming!

Thanks,
Dan

This comes in from the P2L news, posted by a member for a good cause:

100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to victims of the recent Australian bushfires.

Hey not wanting to advertise, but this is a great deal and its going to a great cause! (please remove if you guys don't like the post because of advertisement)

Choose 5 sitepoint books and get them in .pdf form for only $29.95 This is a great deal since they usually are $29.95 for one .pdf. OR its usually $149.75 for all 5. This end February 13 so if you are going to buy, buy fast

http://5for1.aws.sitepoint.com/

100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to victims of the recent Australian bushfires.

cheers.

I’m back from a visit to the first Bulk Barn to open in Quebec and I am back home with roughly 30 pounds of sugar and gelatin based products, with roughly 10% of that already coursing through my veins… and what do I love to do when I’m jacked on 3 pounds of sugar? WATERSKI of course! But seeing as it’s -30c outside, we’ll just have to go with posting a new v5 update! After all, I did promise to get down to business, so lets get biddy wit it!

I have a few items I would like to cover tonight, and in between these points I want to address comments that you guys posted on the first v5 blog posting. Thanks guys for taking the time to post your comments and feedback, I hope you continue to share your ideas and welcome more questions and comments both pre and post release.

Newsletter Update

The current newsletter is a dead duck… a moldy one.. a moldy dead duck that’s been lit on fire, run over and thrown in to a very, very deep hole. And then cement was poured over the hole and a very large building was erected over said hole, never to be revealed again. Needless to say the newsletter was not anywhere near what I wanted it to be, so the current incarnation of this feature is not being pursued at all. For whatever reason, the current newsletter’s readership is somewhere just over 13,000 subscribers… and when I send out a newsletter, I usually get a staggering ZERO responses to it and overall conversion on both P2L and advertised products was virtually non-existent. Why you ask? Well, apparently 12,000 zombies subscribed to the newsletter and don’t actually read it due to rotting eyeballs and the other 1000 are junked automatically by Hotmail’s fabulous spam filters that we can not be white-listed on.

Are you seeing what sugar does to me yet?

So we are going to revamp the newsletter system with a new authoring system, sign up system and a visually more appealing newsletter in your inbox. I am also going to completely nuke the readership database and start everything over from scratch. We’ll be changing to a double opt-in system so the non-readers and spoofed emails will be automatically removed and hopefully those that sign up ensure they white-list us on Hotmail, MSN and all the other places that delete our emails due to the volume of emails our server sends out. This means that once the new version goes out, you will need to RE-SIGN UP for the newsletter, which you can do with the sexy new sign up form or you can enable right in your account settings:

Told you I would start to show more screenshots! OK granted, small, hard to read screenshots…

FORUMS

Ah… the forums. We all love to hate the forums and you can tell by both the comments on my last post here as well as the feedback left on the forum itself, it is impossible to make everyone happy and we get completely opposite ideas on a weekly basis. We need less sections, we need more sections, we need better moderation and should be more strict, our mods are too strict, we need to reorganize, don’t touch the forums they’re great, the forums are devil spawn, the forums are touched by the kiss of God, you suck, you’re awesome etc. And seriously, aside from the kiss of God part, all that stuff is real feedback we’ve received. So let me address a few things I intend to change or add, but of course this list may (read: WILL) change as we get closer:

1. The entire area for posting tutorials will be removed and people will be asked to use the Publishing System for posting their tutorials. Right now people are posting tutorials in the forums AND in the Publishing area, and this doesn’t make an sense. Not only that, but the tutorials posted in the forums are not even being included in our index. PLUS I should also mention we’ll make it worth your while to use the Publishing System instead of the forums.

2. The tutorial request area will be expanded upon… I think the idea of having an area where people can post tutorials they would like to see if a great idea for webmasters that are constantly asking “What should I write about? All the good tutorials are already done!”. I honestly think everyone would benefit if this area was developed and supported a bit better.

3. affenmunkEY is going to have a cow if I don’t address the questions and comments about the graphic services and all that good stuff. This too will be moved away from the forums and become part of our MarketPlace area. All the sales areas for services, websites and such will all be moved to our MarketPlace as well as a bunch of new categories we think are relevant to the community (feel free to share your ideas). There will also be an area for volunteering and free work etc. Please see further down for more details on MarketPlace.

In terms of getting feedback on designs and such that you post, I can’t force people to post… make it interesting and I’m sure people will post feedback if they want to. We really need to focus on what our site is about, and that’s tutorials. Obviously critiquing and feedback go hand in hand with learning and tutorials, but there is no real way for me to force people to post on the forums… you have to be careful how this is handled because forum posting incentives tends to lead in to spam. I’d rather have no feedback than lemmings all passing through posting “Great Job” *click* Neeeeext.

Honestly though, I believe with the increased community involvement and forum exposure that you will find more people posting in all areas of the site. At least, that’s what we’re aiming for!

4. In terms of adding new areas, I don’t believe there are any new areas that need to be added… actually I think further diluting the posting members would only make matters worse. But I am open to suggestions for new areas on the forums, so feel free to suggest.

5. You will be able to jump to a specific tutorial category directly from the forum without having to go to the main page first via a jump menu in the forum header… sneaky peaky below:

That’s about all I want to touch on for the forums for now, but again, if you want to suggest a new area we should add please do by leaving a comment right here on the blog.

MARKETPLACE

To help support P2L and to fund cool prizes (you’re going to see TONS of cool loot up for grabs on the site on a consistent basis), we will be setting up a well organized MarketPlace for pretty much all sales and professional services our users want to offer or buy. All users will be able to post items in the Market Place for a small fee (think $1.95 small) and you will be able to post ads for the following:

1. Websites for sale
2. Domains for sale
3. Templates for sale
4. Design or programming services
5. Freelance jobs
6. Looking for volunteer work
7. Selling miscellaneous items
8. Link exchanges and advertising offers
9. Web hosting
10. and more!

This area won’t be ready for the release however, but it will be the first site update to v5 after the initial release… basically we’re going to release v5 and while we fix bugs and the inevitable issues that crop up with a new release, we’ll be attacking the marketplace for release. We hope that you guys will appreciate a nice organized place to advertise or purchase items and services for a very minimal expense, and depending on it’s success will be a big factor on how much advertising we need to put on the site to fund operations. The more money we can generate with our internal services like the MarketPlace and our Ad System, the less network ads we need to ram down your throats at every turn. Believe me, it would be AWESOME if our internal systems negated the need for external ad networks completely, how cool would THAT be?

I should also mention that active members will be able to purchase MarketPlace placements without having to pay any monetary fees… and you will see why fairly soon! So that’s my little introduction to the MarketPlace for now, we’ll have more on that guy in the near future.

IRC

A P2L Chat room that integrates with the forums is a distinct possibility on the new version… we shall see. I’m hesitant because chats tend to be like a shiny new toy that is fun to play with for a week or two and then gets forgotten about once the novelty has worn off. Maybe you guys can convince me otherwise!

That’s it for me tonight guys, need to run down and get me some more gummi bears! Please be sure to click the comment button below and leave me your feedback/suggestions/comments and we’ll see you on the next update!

Thanks,
Dan

Hello everyone! With v5 development coming close to it’s 1 year finish line (a year already?! How did THAT happen??) I think it’s time we started filling everyone in on what’s been going on, what’s coming up, and to get some user input as we start to put on the finishing touches and polish the chrome. So today my blog is the official v5 update information center for anyone looking for the latest news on the release of the latest version of Pixel2life.com and it’s continued development post release.

Just so [cliches] everyone is on the same playing field and all the cards are down [/cliches] I have obviously noticed the slow down in community involvement on P2L and obviously the lack of participation on the forums compared to a couple of years ago as have many community members have noticed themselves. While tutorial submissions are as high as ever, it seems like overall participation of the traffic is lower and I am looking to address this and bolster the overall traffic and coverage the site receives. Basically this update has two primary goals from my point of view:

1. Increase traffic and user/community participation

2. Increase revenue

Increase Revenue:

Now, before everyone starts screaming about my corporate greed and my blood-lust for money and power and all other worldly possessions, I would like to give everyone a little dose of reality. I have seen people complain about the ads on P2L, complain that I already make a TON of money (apparently I swim and sleep in an in-ground pool filled to the brim with greenbacks), so let me tell you… I WISH! The fact is P2L makes very little money, and this past year has been especially bad with revenues NOT MAKING ENOUGH TO EVEN PAY FOR THE SERVER! That’s right… the server that P2L runs on costs $434 a month, and my last check from Tribal-Fusion was $300 and change. Pixel2life is in fact my FULLTIME job, but obviously with the piss-poor revenue I have had to focus on other things to pay my bills as it’s a tad hard to live on $300 a month. Some months are obviously better when advertising is purchased through the site, but it’s still nothing near what it needs to be to justify committing full-time hours to this project any more.

So how do I plan to address this? More ads? Pop-ups? Bank Robberies? None of the above (well… side)! In fact, we’re going to be going with less ads, especially at launch and I have been looking very hard in to alternative ways of monetizing the site OTHER than hammering people with banner/google ads. Combining these new ideas along with a minimal amount of traditional advertising with solid increases in revenue should turn things around effectively. To tell you the truth, it had better or you might find P2L for sale over at Sitepoint lol! I am no marketing guru and have to admit I know very little in the way of raking in ad money from a site, but I’ve been studying very hard the last few months and have found a number of effective methods that I think will be acceptable to everyone. Not only that, but we are putting together something for our community where YOU will be rewarded for helping us generate revenue and assuring our continued survival. I know it’s a little cryptic at the moment, but it will all be clear in the coming weeks. I am of course always open to ideas on generating revenue, so if you have some tips other than the obvious, please let me know.

But, I can tell you the following in regards to our earning efforts:

- We will NOT be increasing the amount of ads per page in the new version… in fact it will be less in many areas such as the main page and category pages.
- We will NOT employ the use of pop-ups for revenue purposes
- We will be drastically REDUCING the costs of purchasing advertising through our in-house advertising system. For example, all PPC purchases will be a flat rate of 5 cents a click for any campaign size.
- Participating community members will have the opportunity to try our advertising system for FREE with no commitment of making a purchase, no CC information etc. FREE = FREE

Increase traffic and user/community participation:

Due to the waning income and participation on the site, my interest in the project has dropped just short of me packing up shop and moving on to bigger things. The huge delay in releasing v5 hasn’t helped matters and up to now, and you very rarely saw a forum post, news entry or blog post from me… I just haven’t been in to it. I want everyone to know that as we near completion and I get more involved in the daily process with Nick, I am getting more and more excited about this and that I am fully committed to making this the biggest and best release of P2L. I am gearing up for the hard work and campaigning I used to do that got us in to magazine articles, TV show mentions and many other forms of media. I am going to go out there and sell our brand, get us badass prizes and get involved with the community that has made us so successful in the last 5 years. The more I started to think about closing up shop, the more I wanted this refresh, this evolution of the site to be completed so we can show the rest of the tutorial community why we are the best and will always be the best tutorial portal for graphic artists and programmers. P2L has a KICKASS fan base and dedicated staff, it would be stupid to give all that up when you all deserve more than that.

Bottom line here is that I am going all out on this release and the months ahead and you will be seeing my ol’ face a HECK of a lot more than you’ve grown used to in the last year.

We are also working on some exciting new ways of getting the members involved in the community, be it the forums or the tutorials themselves. A brand new reward system will be in place, where you can earn the opportunity to advertise your site with us or take home some awesome loot just for being active on the site! We’re going to be bringing in some hilarious content and goodies of our own for you guys to check out and overall I think you’re going to find the site is “fun” again, rather than a simple list of tutorials with no face attached to it all.

Version 5 is without a doubt our biggest undertaking yet here at P2L and I hope you will join fellow P2L members and keep up to date with the blog updates and I urge you not to hesitate to post any of your comments below by pressing the comment button and using the form to share your thoughts. In fact, if you have any last minute ideas for the site, please go ahead and start sharing them RIGHT NOW, it’s not too late to have them added to the site or to the queue of additional upgrades we want to add to the site after release.

I plan to have news and updates for you guys every few days, so be sure to check back here a couple times a week or grab our RSS Feed.

Thanks!
Dan