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Contributions Open, Traffic Steady & Other News

on May 5th 2008 with 43 comments

It’s two weeks since NETTUTS launched and I’m happy to report the site is kicking along better than I ever expected! With two and a half thousand RSS readers and some eight thousand visitors a day, it’s kinda staggering for a brand new site!

With such booming progress I’ve been knuckling down to get the mechanics of the site working a little better and have plenty of news to tell…

Contributions Open

The big news is that you can now contribute a tutorial to NETTUTS! I’ve created a contribute form and set a reward of $150 for any published tutorial. There are guidelines on the sorts of things we’re looking for over on our Contribute a Tutorial page.

The main criteria will of course be tutorial awesomeness! And so far some applications have already started appearing. I’ve also got emails from some potential regular writers courtesy of a job ad I placed up a few weeks ago. So this week we should see the first content from someone other than me, yay!!

Ads on Sale

I also placed NETTUTS up on BuySellAds to sell ad spots to help pay for contributions, and happily we’ve already sold two spots!! Be sure to pay a visit to both Studio7Designs and PSD2HTML for sponsoring the site so early!

Happily with our steady traffic flow, I’m confident that we should win some more advertising spots over the coming weeks and this site will get to steady publish schedule much faster than I’d originally thought!

I Bought Parallels / WinXP

In my first couple of tutorials I didn’t have any way to test Internet Explorer and there were a couple of browser compatibility issues. Happily yesterday I went out and got Parallels/XP so I’m going to go back and add a footnote to them to fix those.

Also this got me to thinking about how the sum of the knowledge of the community is much greater than an individual writer. Certainly I’ve been learning quite a few things from the comments on the site. So I’m going to figure out a way to take some of the better comments on alternate ways or fixes to a method, and add them to the end of the tutorials to improve them.

Onwards and Upwards

So that’s it for the moment. Still getting things ship shape here, but so far so good! If you have any suggestions on site improvements, do feel free to comment them in. And of course we also have our place to comment in tutorial suggestions for writers.

Thank you everyone for all the support, links and comments. I have the best job in the world :-)

 
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Hello! I'm a web and graphic designer who loves blogging, startups and everything about the web. You can find me on Twitter and I blog at The Netsetter  

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  • Zach

    Hey Collis,

    I can write tutorials, and would love to, but what programming language should they be written in? Are you going to have a specific programming language that this site deals with? Also should I stick with just jQuery or can we include other JS frameworks as well?

    Thanks,
    Zach

  • Zach

    Oh, just read your guidelines section, look forward to some Ruby on Rails tutorials with some jQuery coming from me soon!

  • http://www.rumblestrut.com/ Eric J. Gruber

    I wouldn’t mind seeing a future review of Parallels. I have VMware and like it quite a bit.

    Keep up the great work.

  • http://www.scottnelle.com/ Scott Nellé

    Great to hear that the site is taking off so quickly. Congratulations!

    Do you have any thoughts on the response time for tutorial submissions? I occasionally write up javascript tutorials for my own site, but I’d certainly consider submitting them here first to see if you’re interested in publishing them. If you’re not interested, however, I’d probably publish on my site instead. So I’m wondering how long the approval process might take. Are you thinking days? Weeks? Unspecified? : ) It would be an awful shame to write something and have it sit in limbo for months at a time.

  • http://www.davidpitlyuk.com Dave

    Great job Collis, I’m a big fan of your work, and always looking forward to the next project and site updates.

  • http://www.ndezigns.com Nate

    Progress is going very well. Can’t wait to see more tutorials more often. Thanks Collis

  • Marcus

    Great site, I always stop by. Personally with the way these sites are looking one can only imagine how incredible your wordpress book is going to be. Yeah that’s a not so subtle hint asking for updates. Anyways fantastic site(s) Collis. Truly a boon to the design/development community at large.

  • Andrei Constantin

    Hey Collis, what about some tutorials about networking and security? Like let’s say.. how to setup your own apache/mysql/phpmyadmin environment on your own server, how to read your weblogs, etc etc…

    I could write some ip routing tutorials, traffic shaping, etc..

    please do let me know.

  • http://inspirationup.com Joefrey Mahusay

    Great news Collis. Yay!! I can’t wait to see more tutorials specially on CSS and Jquery tuts.

  • http://davidcarreira.com D. Carreira

    Maybe I’ll write a tutorial :D

    David Carreira

  • http://www.ben-griffiths.com Ben Griffiths

    Hooray for more tutorial awesomeness! Keep it up :)

  • http://akamike.net/ Mike Robinson

    I’m glad to hear that NETTUTS has had a successful launch. I’m quite keen to submit my own tutorials at some point, and I can’t wait to read more here :)

  • http://www.psdnerd.com Harry

    Can we write tutorials for things like C and Visual Basic ?? or does it need to be website building language

    Harry

  • http://www.engageinteractive.co.uk Will

    I’m writing a tutorial in my spare time. Just a covering of some basics that I remember being really hard to find when I was first starting out with CSS. No one writes tutorials on the really simple stuff!

    Engage Interactive – Web Design Harrogate

  • http://www.freshclickmedia.com Shane

    @Harry – I’m guessing, and this is just a guess here, that nettuts would welcome internet-related only tutorials.

  • http://www.freshclickmedia.com Shane

    How about ASP.NET tutorials? Any call for that amongst readers of nettuts? I reckon there should be a poll! :)

  • http://ineedcinch.com The Other Zach

    i’m all for a poll. maybe we could see some tuts about setting up an LAMP server or something like that. i’d love to know how to set that up. also, maybe a tut, or series of tuts about setting up a CMS like Joomla, or WordPress, or Drupal.

  • Read the Categories

    Well guys, if you took a minute to read the categories or guidelines above you would see that this is not going to be about C++ programming or visual basic:

    He is looking for

    HTML / CSS technique
    jQuery or similar libraries
    Flash / Actionscript 2 / Actionscript 3
    CMS’s – WordPress, Expression Engine, Joomla, etc
    We may be looking for simpler PHP or Ruby on Rails tutorials soon as well.

    So I assume no ASP.NET either, only open source alternatives

  • http://www.besthostingtop10.com Craig Templet

    ASP.NET? Lol, I think we should stick to little less archaic languages, such as Django and Rails!

  • http://www.swaymedia.com Ali

    Your a genius, I cant wait for the next tut. Keep up the good work!

  • http://www.justinlilly.com Justin Lilly

    Assuming that you’re still on the trial for parallels, I’d suggest getting vmware fusion. I’ve had infinitely better performance from it over parallels. It would at least be worth getting the trial to test it out.

  • http://www.designXmachina.com Christian Mejia

    Andrei Constantin,

    Your tut ideas would be extremely helpful for someone like me who is clueless on that. Hopefully Collis considers it.

    CM

  • Action discrète

    Great news ! Website enjoys everyone here.

  • Charles Williams

    What about a tutorial to show how a image driven website like psdtuts.com can load images fast, without the little square x boxes popping up first? It could also be combined with a tutorial that’s easy for users to navigate.

  • http://laminbarrow.com Lamin Barrow

    @Shane
    I have asked for this before but unfortunately i got no feedback from any of the readers. Anyways, eventually i think server side stuff such as ASP.Net, PHP, Ruby on Rails, JSP etc will make it here no matter what because the internet longer has a place for static .htm pages.

  • http://laminbarrow.com Lamin Barrow

    I am looking forward to writing some ASP.Net and related technology (ASP.Net AJAX, ASP.Net MVC etc) for this site sometime soon.

  • http://www.groene-appel.nl Igor

    @ lamin barrow

    I agree, internet is more as xhtml/css.
    some serverside stuff sounds great to me!
    But I really hope the tutorials will cover practical usage of this stuff.
    Anyway, I’m looking forward to the tutorials!

  • http://www.goldenthunder.com Nico

    how cool!

  • http://ineedcinch.com The Other Zach

    @Lamin Barrow – I would be interested in some server-side scripting stuff. you’re right about very few pages having static .htm pages.

  • airbball23

    OT homie FTW

  • http://pickysurfer.com Danny

    This site deserves all the attention. Very helpful

  • http://www.dandenney.com Dan Denney

    I am a huge fan of your web “family”. Thank you so much for your hard work.

  • Helder Almeida

    Would be nice to have the opportunity the submit .NET tuts as well.
    Although .Net is paid there is a growing community developing and helping each other, examples with the Silverlight community, Popfly, etc..
    Its rather easy to find tuts/resources about open source languages but not as much with .net, so it would be nice to have a little spot in the website for it. Of course I’m not talking about Drag-And-Drop websites with code that everyone knows but some usefull full-site tutorials with Ajax using the DOM structure (with perhaps a twist of Jquery) and not using the same old garbagy Update Panels.
    Anyways, this was my first comment, I’ve been an avid reader/fan since psdtuts and I wish u the best of luck for this new project.

  • Mariusz

    I would like to se article about CMS’s

  • http://www.freshclickmedia.com Shane

    @Lamin,

    I’ve got a couple of ASP.NET control tutorials up my sleeve.

    1) Creating a Gravatar ASP.NET control.
    2) Create a Light Box (based on Lighbox 2 by Lokesh Dhakar) control for ASP.NET.

    Both would take through the basics of control development, with the second teaching readers to include javascript in their custom controls.

    Would that interest you? Any other readers?

  • http://www.corvettemotorsport.com Tman

    Great site! I havent personally used anything for my site, But I might in the future. Reading these tuts has already sharpened my skills when making things. One neat thing would be to have either Brightcove or youtube players with video tutorials. With or without that, the site is still great!

    Keep up the good work

  • http://pakcikkantin.wordpress.com Helmy

    Cool , at last another site for .net things, talking about web2.0. We’ll see how things goin on the jquery

  • http://thinkbrilliantly.com Chee

    Well, pretty cool. But, it isn’t very smooth, rather jerky.

  • http://puremango.co.uk user24

    an article on how you got such great traffic so seemingly easily would be nice to see! great site, looking forward to learning a lot from you.

  • http://www.1pxsolid.com Scott Mackenzie

    Awesome! I think I might have some handy Mootools and Expression Engine tuts for you. Just have to find some time to compose. Love the site mate.

  • http://www.windows7themes.com Windows Themes

    This is a great website. Thank you nettuts for all those great tutorials !

  • http://www.dev-hq.co.uk Joe

    I Luv this site!

  • http://rowend.com/ rowend

    great site