Something Wicked This Way Comes...

I've been working on something, and I figured that I should share it with anyone who actually reads the stuff I publish here.

I originally started writing here as a small attempt at bringing tutorials for doing high-quality photography using F/OSS to everyone. So far, it's been amazing and I've really loved meeting and getting to know many like-minded folks.

I'm not leaving. Having just re-read that previous paragraph makes it sound like I am. I'm not.

I am, however, working on something new that I'd like to share with you, though. I've called it:


I've been writing to hopefully help fill in some gaps on high-quality photographic processes using all of the amazing F/OSS tools that so many great groups have built, and now I think it's time to move that effort into its own home.

F/OSS photography deserves its own site focused on demonstrating just how amazing these projects are and how fantastic the results can be when using them.

I'm hoping pixls.us can be that home. Pixel-editing for all of us!

I'm been building the site in my spare time over the past couple of weeks (I'm building it from scratch, so it's going a little slower than just slapping up a wordpess/blogger/CMS site). I want the new site to focus on the content above all else, and to make it as accessible and attractive as possible for users. I also want to keep the quality of the content as high as possible.

If anyone would like to contribute anything to help out: expertise, artwork, images, tutorials and more, please feel free to contact me and let me know. I'm in the process of porting my old GIMP tutorials over to the new site (and probably updating/re-writing a bunch of it as well), so we can have at least some content to start out with.

If you want to follow along my progress at the moment while I build out the site, I'm blogging about it on the site itself at http://pixls.us/blog. As mentioned in the comments, I actually do have an RSS feed for the blog posts, I just hadn't linked to it yet (working on it quickly). The location (should your feedreader not pick it up automatically now) is: http://pixls.us/blog/feed.xml.

If you happen to subscribe in a feedreader, please let me know if anything looks off or broken so I can fix it! :)

Things are in a constant state of flux at the moment (did I mention that I'm still building out the back end?), so please bear with me. Please don't hesitate for a moment to let me know if something looks strange, or with any suggestions as well!

When it's ready to go, I'm going to ask for everyones help to get the word out, link to it, talk about it, etc. The sooner I can get it ready to go, the sooner we can help folks find out just how great these projects are and what they can do with them!

Excelsior!

14 comments:

  1. Great news!!
    I'm learning a lot following this blog, so I'll be looking forward to checking the new site!

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  2. Oh no! No RSS (or atom) feed for the other blog! If you could add it, it would be much easier to follow. Thanks!

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    1. Actually there is a feed, I just hadn't linked to it yet. It's at:

      http://pixls.us/blog/feed.xml

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    2. This link is a 404...

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    3. I just made it live. Can you check again? I'm seeing it resolve ok on my end. Thanks! :)

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    4. It works! Thanks

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  3. This sounds great!

    Hopefully this will be a good home for noobs and experts alike, I have learned so much from patdavid.net :)

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    1. I'm hoping so! I'll still be posting stuff here, but plan on pushing more polished material to pixls.us.

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  4. You're a brave soul to build that thing from scratch. That said, it looks great so far! I don't see anything obviously broken, and my reader picked up your .xml feed right away. So far so good. As always, I applaud your efforts to further the FOSS community. Although I do much of my editing in Lightroom (the workflow alone blows everything else away), I do a lot of my fine tuning and a few other edits in GIMP. I'm looking forward to keeping up with your site.

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  5. If it fits in with your vision for the site, could you consider a feed with the full content of a post?

    I personally find it annoying to have to switch to a browser to read more than the introductory paragraphs of a blog post. Especially since I'm generally reading with an off-line feed reader which means I'm not able to read the post unless I'm connected to wifi.

    Other than that good luck, I've always found your tutorials to be useful and well written and am looking forward to seeing what the new site brings.

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    1. Absolutely! I had considered doing full feeds, but was worried that some of the data might get mangled by feed readers (there was an issue with image sizes using the feed reader in Thunderbird for instance).

      I'll change it to a full feed, but you're now tasked with checking that they still render correctly in your reader and letting me know so I can fix it! :)

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    2. Cheers :)

      The latest post ("An About Page and Help") displayed fine on Feedly on PC (in Firefox) and using Press on an Android Tablet.

      It also looked good in Feedly on Android, but that forces the magazine format so there is not much you can do there.

      I'll let you know if anything goes astray :).


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  6. That's a truly remarkable initiative and surely a huge effort on your shoulders! As a FOSS developer I can only felicitate your new project and hope that it will be fully operational very soon.

    The tutorials and informations that guide through the usage of many free image editors is so scattered that is almost impossible to find and follow. If you will manage to collect at least part of the existing good material in one place, that would be a priceless gift for the whole community!

    Do you plan to cover image editors other than GIMP?

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    1. Thanks! I'm hoping it works out that way as well...

      Yes, I plan to cover as much software pertaining to f/oss photography as I can (time and resources permitting!). I'm starting with GIMP, but will absolutely include all the software in a workflow.

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