Site News

Note From The Editor

on Aug 18th 2008 with 124 comments

Jeffrey here. I have a few things that I’d like to go over with everyone – as well as some questions. If you don’t mind, take a couple of minutes and leave a comment with your thoughts.

We’re Looking For A Staff Writer

We’re currently looking for one more person to write a weekly tutorial. Here is the catch; I’m looking for someone unique. We’ve got PHP, WordPress, and jQuery covered. I need someone to cover everything else – from Flash to Ruby. If you think you have the goods, Email Us and we’ll talk! The pay is $150 per tutorial.

What Do You Want?

I’d like to know what sort of tutorials you are craving? The community determines what we post, so please leave a comment with your opinion. Personally, I’d like to see more frameworks and libraries covered – like Ruby, ASP.NET, Drupal, MooTools, etc. I’d like to post some more Flash tutorials as well. What do you want?

Quick Tips: Stay Or Go?

My plan is to have a full tutorial every morning (Central Time) and a quick tip in the evening. Are you enjoying these quick tips, or would you prefer that we focus more on the full tutorials? Personally, I enjoy five minute tips. My days are busy and allow little time for deciphering long tutorials – although I try to make time whenever I can. P.S. On my personal site, I, just today, rolled out a series of “Two Minute Video Tips” to be posted every day during the work week. Be sure to check those out if you enjoy such things.

Premium Service Is On The Way

We are currently working to bring a “premium” members service to NETTUTS. For $19 per month, you’ll gain access to many features – TBD. Once again, my question to you is: What would you expect for your $19 per month? Personally, I’d like to see exclusive video tutorials. Other ideas might be t-shirts and/or a magazine subscription? This is all speculation right now, but your feedback will help us a great deal!

One Last Request

Over the next week or so, I’m going to be compiling a massive list of the best web development books available – as voted by you! Please take a few seconds to vote. After I’ve received all of the submissions, I’ll create a posting that details the top ten or twenty!


Thanks, everyone!

 
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I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and love making the process of building for the web as easy as possible. Also, I'm finishing up my latest book on Laravel Testing! If you want be friends, say hi on Twitter.  

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  • http://mothership.co.nz/blog Karl Hardisty

    Definitely keep quick tips. Both choice and variety are good things, so keep ‘em coming!

    Also – with quick tips, often they’re something small that would otherwise not be covered, and also not often searched out (or even covered) on sites.

  • http://www.ilovelegion.com Spartacus

    I know some people are sick of the WordPress coverage on this site but I would love to see a tutorial series that runs through the process of creating a WP Template from scratch.

    Advanced CSS is always good, there’s too much of the same thing out there and far too much of it is really basic beginner stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that but some high brow stuff would keep the progression goin.

    I’ve been a big fan of these sites for what feels like a long time, my skill set has really improved in the short space of time I’ve migrated here from PSDTUTs. I really appreciate the work that goes into this little empire and it’s the best place for fresh tutorials that are relevent to my job.

    Thanks

  • http://jakejohnson.com Jake Johnson

    You guys are already off to a great start and I’d love to see more jQuery tutorials. Create a jQuery plugins database with user reviews. Maybe a snippets database too!

    Here’s some more ideas for tutorials/quick tips…

    1) IE6/IE7 CSS Bugs
    2) Firebug/Debugging Tips
    3) Usability Tips
    4) Web 2.0 Application Case Studies w/ Implementations, Examples
    5) CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Zend (Saw this mentioned earlier, good idea! Also comparing the PHP frameworks)
    6) CSS Frameworks
    7) ExtJS, YUI, Mootools

    If you’re going to do a premium service I’d probably expect to see videos of creating a complete website/web application.

    Hope this helps!

  • http://www.chadfullerton.com Chad Fullerton

    I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but it looks to me like Collis is planning a global membership, like what has been suggested above.

    http://tutsplus.com/

    TutsPlus.. a system that lets you gain ‘plus’ features to all the TUTS family of sites? Sounds like it’s coming.

    –Chad

  • http://pixeldonor.com Jeremy Peck

    Personally, I’d like to see some means of open communication like this (perhaps forums as suggested) where users can post what it is they’re interested in learning/seeing more often… I’d love to put together more Mootools tutorials that are considerably more advanced (or straight forward for that matter) but at the same time creating something different. We see a lot of the same sort of tasks being accomplished with jQuery all the time.

    Something besides WordPress! I’ve been spending what little free time I have exploring ExpressionEngine more, but I’d love to see some tutorials from “the pros” on other CMS.

    I like the idea of video based tutorials, it would definitely speed things up (I think?) for the tutorial writer, as you can communicate a lot more information and it gives people the opportunity to see a developer working in their environment… everyone’s always asking about process, and work flow, and I think that would really show through here. I don’t know what sort of services are available (and affordable) for hosting streaming video that NETTUTS could look into, but it definitely seems worth the effort.

  • http://www.lineofdesign.dk Sandie

    Oh my lord! You got quite a feedback there?! Cool. :)

    I’d just like to say, that I’m not really a developer- more a designer.
    And more than half the times I visit this site- I leave just as fast again, cause the topics are way too advanced!

    I think more CSS-tuts and perhaps articles, that explains what jquery and Ruby etc. are? And what they do?
    I’d like simple but valurable framworks, that are easy to implement on my own website to give it a wow-effect.
    Acctually- I wold pay to subscribe- if I got finished -ready to put on my own site codes. And the for free could just contain the tutorials.
    This way you pay to get it easy and quick. And you visit the site for free to just learn how to do it yourself..

    How about that?

  • http://baffleinc.com/ Harley Alexander

    Hey guys! Re the book questions (only one or 2 I think) – Collis and I are working hard to get it finished – I assure you my part is very nearly finished. As I’ve taken time of the tutorials, I’ll be coming back into the article side of things with a rather large article – some cool jQuery integrated with WordPress; completely rethinking how a Blog is – actually taking a different medium and applying it to a Blog.

  • James

    As others have stated, I think video tutorials would be a great addition. They allow the user to take the whole tutorial in faster and in a more visual sense then just screenshots here and there as in written tutorials. Allowing video tutorial submissions would really boost my interest in both writing and reading tutorials on this site!

    As for content, I thnk its safe to say not everyone wants the same thing. The topic covered by this site is so wide that it would be impossible to cover all the areas not to mention skill levels. I find the more topics covered the more interested I am. I am always searching for new and unique ways of acomplishing things dealing in web development. The more unique the tutorials are the better!

    Anyways, just my thoughts.

  • http://www.barrymcgee.net Barry McGee

    Keep quick tips and more JS tutorials please!

  • Nikrazy

    Hey!! great site and awsome tuts, but could you write more on ruby and also actionscript/flex? thanks very much:)

  • http://www.kieru.com Rob

    I’m enjoying the Quick Tip series; if anything I’d want to see you expand that series even more. Like quick little PHP scripts, Flash tips, etc. Thus far it seems to be CSS-Oriented.

    I’m also eagerly awaiting your next PHP guide. I work primarily in front-end PHP design with a bit of custom CMS-writing, but am by no means a competent PHP programmer, so I’m always excited to see new “from the beginning” tutorials.

    Another thing (which may be mentioned in posts above mine) that I’d like to see is some tutorials on the use of regular expressions. They are highly useful in any scripting language; and from my experience not so well understood.

  • http://www.themooreproject.com Todrick

    Personally, I am trying to make the jump from designer to developer/designer. I have a strong interest in css, php, cms flash and flex. I love the tutorials for what they show but information on what a particular mark up can do would be helpful. I vote yes for the quick tips. More tutorials on drupal and joomla. Projects on a larger scale like social sites, application building with explanations supporting your choices. Screen casts work well an an alternative to typing every step in a post.

  • Tristen

    I love the format: morning article and quick tip in the evening.
    I am hugely supportive of articles related to Drupal and Ruby.
    There are many topics not fully covered in the Drupal community and
    i think the format you present here for tutorials is brilliant.

  • http://freshclass.deviantart.com Charlotte Spencer

    I would like more HTML/CSS tutorials, and some more PHP.
    Flash would be interesting.

  • http://talkingtofu2.iblogger.org Taylor Satula

    Will we be getting those shirts soon?

  • http://adamkayce.com Adam Kayce

    Both long tuts and quick tips are great—some of the longer tutorials are too exhaustive, so the Quick Tips are easily digestible, which I’m grateful for—and count me in for anything and everything WordPress.

    Your WordPress tutorials have gone far beyond a lot of the ultra-basic ones I see on many sites; very meaty.

    The jQuery stuff is awesome; I haven’t yet gotten into much else (like Ruby), so I’m more in the beginners’ ranks. But lovin’ it – this site totally rocks.

  • http://callidemedia.com Abethebabe

    I don’t think you guys have had enough PHP tutorials, 90% of the posts are on Javascript and Ajax.

    Something that would kick my ass is if you guys made a link roundup of great PHP tutorials or make some. (the only php tutorial I saw was the one on the guy that wanted to learn PHP and make it a group effort).

    Other than that you guys are doing great, I really like this site. Unlike other tutorials sites your tutorials are quality and work, and you are consistent with your posts.

    I wish you guys the best!

  • http://www.fancy-ideas.com Marcel

    Some more CMS tuts besides WordPress would be great.
    Especially the design parts, as creating really stylish themes for
    joomla or drupal. Oh, and the quick tips are just great.
    Keep them! ;)

  • ignite

    CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine would be tops on my list to add. Also, keep the JS library tutorials coming (jquery, extjs, mootools, etc.). I also would be interested in video tutorials but they’d have to be of the quality that lynda.com provides for me to pay any type of fee.

    I agree that there needs to be a forum too.

  • http://www.evanbot.com Evan Byrne

    I would love to see some tutorials on Developing Adobe Air Desktop Applications. ^^

  • Sebastian

    Hard to add anything useful to the above list, so I’ll just keep it short. I’d love to see more accessibility and usability tutorials here, and things like ‘AJAX, from A to X – a comprehensive beginners guide’. That’s because I love the things AJAX can do, but I’m not really into XML, DOM, … yet, but I’d love to see the magic happen.

    As for the question about a premium section: I wouldn’t pay for it. For one, if I don’t find it here, I’ll most likely find it somewhere else (only not that well written), and I believe it would be very hard to satisfy everyone. But that has been established, when I read the other comments.

  • Nathan

    I’d like to see a guide about using subversion in a web workflow. There seems to be little out there describing how to set it up, and how to use it, specifically for web development. And now that Coda has introduced subversion support – it would be a good time for a good introduction.

  • Jatin Meshiya

    Seriously I wnat to say something. i and all of my friends are not much capable of spend $10 per month. psdtuts.com has done this and we are damaged in knoledge. please spread knoledge as free as possible otherwise people like us bellow middle class families never get updated. please dont make it a $ game.

    please reply!

  • John

    I would love to see tutorials on PHP, CSS etc that are definately not covered anywhere else on any other sites, if theres something that no one else has provided yet then i would like to see it here.

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