news about Planet Blender

jesterPrincess was not really wanting to fall asleep, so I took her at some point in the sling, where she finally fell asleep. During that time I worked more on Planet Blender (and some other projects that will be published soon enough. Exciting!). I give you back the possibility to browse pages again! As of this writing, there are 393 pages worth of reading, meaning a whopping lot of community chatter

I also fixed numerous bugs throughout the code base, reshuffling code too.

Enjoy!

After a long period of being busy with family and other important things, I finally got around to doing something with Planet Blender. The speed of v2 beta1 was frankly quite awful, and I was looking into doing something with clean and small code.

I searched for solutions and finally I tried my hand on Web.py. In 10 minutes I rewrote the front-end to something that is nice compact and easy to maintain. I dropped also the resource hog javascript (dojotoolkit) so that the site is now nice fast compared to the previous version. I imagine that browsing Planet Blender is now easier also for those that use addons like NoScript and filtering solutions. There’s still enough left to do (like a proper layout), but with the new code in place I should be able to write more code in shorter time (I’m just more comfortable writing Python than PHP… )

I hope you enjoy coming to this Planet Blender and find information and news to your liking.

/Nathan

Finally I sat down and enabled the RSS feed for Planet Blender. This file you can now add back to your favourite feed reader. It shows the latest 10 blogs that have been aggregated into Planet Blender. The feed is updated together with the contents of Planet Blender. So once every hour you get the latest news of what is going on in our Blender world.

I have also created another feature, which you hopefully will like: reading of older and newer posts on Planet Blender. At the top you can now find buttons for browsing through all the pages in Planet Blender. There are at this writing over 120 pages worth of posts. With 20 posts featured on each page that is over 2400 posts.

Now that Planet Blender can be read outside of Planet Blender, the addition of navigation. This all adds up to the first beta release of Planet Blender v2.

As always, do report missing feeds through the submission panel (note: submit the actual RSS/ATOM feed, that ensures better handling).

You may also have noticed the two campaigns that are running on Planet Blender. I support both Project Durian and Project London. For Project Durian, lets get to the 2000 sold copies during preorder! Have your friends order one too. Project London I’ve been following for a long time, and I think they’re doing a great job, using Blender for all the CGI in the film. It’ll be a blast!

That’s it for now. Enjoy Planet Blender, and if you have improvement ideas, don’t hesitate to send them in by commenting on the news items.

As you may have noticed in our community, a new attempt to sell Blender, while abusing the work of fellow Blenderheads has appeared. Blendernation.com has written about this, so has blender.org and already many other blogs too.

Now, I think that it is ok to make money using Blender. It is a good thing to do. BUT it should be done always with respect for those who have devoted their time to improving and developing the software and services around it. And with the utmost respect to the entire community when you are going to rebrand Blender. Looking at the site of 3DMagix I cannot see any of the above. I see a foul attempt to rid people of their precious money (which they very probably could better spend on their families) through a whole lot of tactics that to my eye look like everything that spam and scams do.

In short: making money with Blender is good, but not when it is through scams, bringing Blender and its community a bad name and by abusing the works from others.

I call for all bloggers around the world to write about this and to link to the Blendernation and blender.org articles. This we can’t let go without counter-measures.

It’s hard to believe that already a year has passed since I opened the site on April 25th of 2008. Things have gradually grown, from only a handful of feeds to well over a hundred. During this year almost 7000 blog posts have been aggregated by Planet Blender, averaging over 18 posts per day.

In order to ensure we keep growing and providing quick community updates, I invite everybody to send in more Blender-related blog feeds, from any language possible. Send them to my mailbox.

I hope that the coming year will be as interesting as the previous one, with growth and enough to read for everybody who likes to follow Planet Blender.

Cheers,

/Nathan