Monthly Archives: February 2009

Changes at Envato: Meet Tuts+

Envato, the ever-interesting network run by Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, has revamped their TUTS websites. NETTUTS, PSDTUTS, and their kin are now housed under the name of “Tuts+,” with a central website at Tutsplus.com. They’re the same sites, but more tightly-knit.

Today across the Tuts+ network we’re rolling out some changes to our brand and how our sites work together. These changes include a rebrand of our logos, a shift from multiple domain names to a single top level domain, a universal Plus membership, a Plus Affiliate Program, updated Plus interface, a Twitter Tuts+ news stream and a new tutsplus.com site complete with a rearrangeable dashboard. In other words, a whole bunch of stuff!

You can read the full announcement here, with all of the big changes they’ve been making.

Overall the changes seem pretty good. I’ve always been a fan of the Ta’eed’s sites, the TUTS ones especially. However, a couple of the changes bug me a little…

  1. The new logos and naming scheme don’t seem quite right. Net.tuts+ just seems kind of awkward. It doesn’t read as well as NETTUTS. I’ve always wondered whether I should say “Net tutts” or “Net toots,” but now I have to say “Net tutts plus,” and write it with that awkward period and plus sign.
  2. The move to subdomains of tutsplus.com seems silly. You have the domains, they’re well established, they’re easier to type why change them? They may still get you there, but you’re jsut dilluting your existing brand. There’s already Tuts+ and Envato branding plastered all over the TUTS (sorry, “Tuts+”) sites. I can see not wanting to drop thousands of dollars for new *tuts.com domains, but it seems silly to change the other ones as well. I think it would be better to make the subdomains be the secondary, redirect URL for the sites that have their own domains.

I can understand the changes, but those two just don’t sit well with me… I suppose I will get used to them in time.

WP125 1.3.0 Released

The WordPress 125×125 ad management plugin has just got better, with yet another release. Version 1.3.0 fixes a few bugs, and adds some useful new features. New features in 1.3.0: iCalendar subscription – Want to keep tabs on ad expirations better? Subscribe to them…

Google Canonical URLs

Finally, the solution for our duplicate content worries is over! Google now supports a new method to specify a canonical URL for your page. This “hint” suggests that Google use this page as the original, and ignore duplicates elsewhere on your domain. You simply…

PHP Serialize() Function

Arrays certainly are useful. If you’re dealing with associative data, there’s no better tool for the job. Sometimes, you’ll run into cases where it would be useful to store an entire array in a field in a database. It’s not something you want to…

BlogBuzz February 14, 2009

Yahoo Monetizes Yahoo BOSS

Yahoo is currently readying the next major update to it’s BOSS Search API. With it they will bring access to SearchMonkey data, optional longer abstracts, and greater flexibility for monetization. They will also be tracking API usage, and charging nominally for monthly usage greater…

PHP Str_Replace() Function

Have you ever wanted to take a string and replace every occurance of a substring with something else? Regular Expression voodoo is what first comes to mind for a lot of PHP developers. But there is an easier way that just happens to be…

Compete.com: Compare Your Site With the Competition

Have you ever wondered how your site stacks up against its competitors? Most people don’t make their traffic stats available to the general public, though doing so can attract advertisers… That’s what Compete.com is for. They use some secret methods to estimate site traffic,…

Defending Your Blog’s Copyright

ProBlogger has a new guest post up, by Gary from DevOracles.com, on how to stop scrapers from profiting from your work. The article explains how to write Cease and Decist letters and DMCA takedown notices, and who to send them to. The post recommends…

Twhirl: A Lightweight Twitter Client

Twhirl is my Twitter client of choice. It’s lightweight and it has a respectful feature set. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR, and therefore will work on Windows and Mac OS X. (Linux too, but if I remember correctly, Adobe AIR is a little buggy…