There have been lots of things happening on FD this week. Here are the highlights:
The Updated and Improved Asset Library Is Live - New Assets and Easier Downloads!
Authors rejoice! The new and improved asset library is live! There are over 100 new assets to play with, now organized into handy themed packs for download.
Here are a few things to note:
Our own ADG3Studios has created a set of AMAZING audio loops for your templates. There’s more coming soon from ADG3, so stay tuned.
Triworks has donated almost 70 awesome 3D image assets for you authors to enjoy!
Many FD authors and members have contributed assets. If you want to know who contributed a particular asset, you can find their username at the end of the image title. Thanks to all who contributed!!
Images now have a (subtle) Eden watermark. We had to do this as we were finding that some people were using the images that were kindly donated by FD members for other purposes! This will keep the asset library images safe from theft and nefarious activities!
Audio now also has a (very subtle) FlashDen watermark. This is for the same reason as above – to protect our contributors copyright!
The watermark – asset library image thanks to Madness
We hope you enjoy these new assets! We’ll be updating the asset library every few months, and will notify you when this happens via the blog. Remember to check the agreement at the top of the page before you download assets to use in your FD files. They can only be used on files for sale on FD! Enjoy, and we welcome any feedback in the comments or via Support!
Site Updates Have Begun!
After the huge site update this week you guys gave us some great feedback, and the first round of fixes has been made. The one you’re most likely to notice is the forum thread feed on the home page - it’s much longer! More improvements are on their way so we’ll keep you posted!
Advertising Galore!
Many of you may have seen that we are now running an FD ad campaign on The Deck, putting FD in front of a huge selection of the types of people who enjoying buying our stuff! We’ve been advertising all over the place, but we’re only just getting started. This month we’ll be revving up all kinds of advertising and marketing initiatives to get new eyes on your files! So watch out for lots of extra traffic and activity on FD. If you know of any sites that you think we should be advertising on, leave them in the comments!
Last year one of the FlashDen founders, Collis Ta’eed, spoke at the 2007 webDU conference in Sydney, Australia. The conference was huge, and he left with a slew of new contacts, new information, and extra enthusiasm for his two most favourite subjects – Flash and webdesign! This year promises to be even bigger and better than the last!
The lovely people over at webDU have given us a ticket to this years conference to give away to one lucky reader!
In case you don’t already know webDU, it is the biggest web technology conference in the southern hemisphere for Flash, Flex, Air and Web Design. It’s the place to get hands-on technical training, gain new skills and hear breaking news from the web industry.
For your chance to win a full webDU conference pass* check out the agenda and let us know why you want a ticket to webDU in 25 words or less. Post your entry in the comments and on the 14th of May we’ll judge them and send the winner their ticket to web technology central!
Collis can’t be at the conference this year as he’s in Hong Kong, but he hopes he can live vicariously and experience the joys of web-geekery through the lucky winner. So enter now!!
Collis answering questions at last year’s webDU conference. Photo by Jens Brynildsen – thanks Jens!!
Terms and conditions
Entry is open to anyone who is NOT a paid staff member.
The winner will receive 1 full conference ticket to the conference for the 12-13 June 2008. Workshops, travel and accommodation are not included.
Ensure you include a valid email address in the email field when leaving your comment so that we have a way to contact you.
Any comment entered between the time of this post and 11:59PM May 13th 2008 (Australian Eastern Standard Time) is eligible.
The winner will be selected solely at the discretion of FlashDen and its staff.
It’s what every Flashden author fears, file rejection!
Believe it or not, as many as 50% of files uploaded to Flashden get rejected, mostly for incorrect file formats or perhaps copyright infringement. One thing to understand is that we don’t enjoy having to reject files, but we do it in order to educate authors and also maintain quality and consistency across the Web site.
As well as the general uploading instructions all Flash authors should be aware of, we’ve compiled a list to highlight some of the common mistakes authors make when uploading content. We hope you find this information useful not only for new authors, but experienced authors too!
Ensure you provide an .fla file AND a published .swf, not only for your preview files, but for your main files also. We need the .fla file so we can check that the file/code is original, it has not been stolen from anywhere, and that there are no malicious code injections. The published .swf comes in useful particularly with files using special fonts as the reviewer may not have the special font on their computer. We want Flashden visitors to be able to preview files in the way you intended, so providing a .swf helps out not only us, but you and the potential customer too.
Always ZIP your files, do not use .rar format. If you use .rar to package your files, your file will get rejected! This is simply because most users are familiar with .zip format, maintains consistency, and helps out all the people who purchase your content.
When you provide a help file or documentation, don’t just write about what the file does. A description of the file is not the same as help documentation! Actually explain how the file can be updated by the user. List the structure of any XML files you use, for example. Mention the line numbers when referring to variables in your ActionScript code. And here’s a quick tip about writing documentation: Write it as though your grandmother would be reading it. Make sure it is very easy to understand. You might think this might take a while to write, but in the long term, it will save you time and avoid anyone writing to you asking “How do I do this…? If someone then writes to you to ask for help with one of your files, you can simply write back, “The answer to your question(s) is in the help documentation provided free with the file!”
Flashden is very strict about adhering to copyright rules and regulations. If you use your own photos or sound effects that you own copyright on, just let us know. You can provide this information in the description field for all users to see, or just in the “Comments for the Reviewer” field that are only visible to the file reviewer once you submit. If you do not provide adequate information about copyrighted and potentially copyrighted files, we will unfortunately have to reject your files. If ever you are unsure about whether a file you are using is copyrighted or not, please consider using the free-to-use Flashden image, audio and video assets available on our Web site.
Finally, please note that we no longer accept files that contain external links to Web sites. For example, if you create an XML news ‘widget’, please do not hyperlink to Google, Yahoo, or your own personal site. What you can do, and must do, is link to any page within Flashden instead. That might mean the Flashden home page, your personal Flashden portfolio page, or absolutely anywhere as long as it is within Flashden.net.
Are there any questions about the approval process you would like to ask Flashden? Is there anything you think we could do to improve the approval process? Please leave us a comment in this blog post if so, we would be glad to hear from you! We listen to every single suggestion sent to Flashden, and try to implement as many as we can. We’re privileged to have such a vibrant and talented bunch of contributors to the Flashden community!
Part of the prize for our most recent competition was to be profiled on this blog. Happily, these are some talented guys so this is going to be easy!! These guys added their files in order to help the community, so support them by checking out their portfolios!
Winner: Random
Random is a Flash developer who hails from sunny Argentina. He’s a black paw and a regular contributor on the forums. He also has some great files and loves the word “Powerful” (see below)! Here are some highlights:
From Chicago, Illanois, Adfish is one of our best and brightest audio authors. A master of audio loops and effects, you can check out some of his most popular files below.
Our other runner up, Kariminal, is not an author, but will hopefully enjoy his US$100 worth of FD credits! Thanks to all who entered, and stay tunes for the next competition!
There’s nothing like a spring clean to make you feel fresh and snappy. And since much of the world is in the height of spring, we thought we’d give FlashDen a little rejig in the form of a pair of new homepages coupled with a reskin of many of the site’s colours, header and footer.
So what’s new?
There are now two versions of the homepage - one when you’re logged in and one when you’re logged out. The double homepage means that for new visitors we have more space to explain and sell the concept of the site, while for regular users we can ignore that aspect and get to the content.
The logged in homepage has a “Dashboard” area. It’s still quite primitive, but over time we’ll be developing that to link off to important things you can do - like checking comments, recent items you’ve bookmarked, or items that you’ve just had approved.
Our homepages both now display only recent items from exclusive authors, and those who have not yet qualified to sell exclusively through FlashDen. In other words if you are able to be exclusive and haven’t chosen to do so, your items won’t appear on the homepage. This is to encourage users to keep their FlashDen portfolio different from items they might be selling elsewhere, as we really want to make FlashDen unique!
On all but the homepage there is now a footer displaying recent items, blog posts and forum threads. We realised the footer space had been previously totally unused, and now represents a means to send users around the site to see the latest happenings.
Also updated are the links in the very top header when you’re logged in. They now include “Deposit”, “Become an Author” and “View Earnings”, a few extra quick links for users to get to.
Naturally the biggest change is the recolouring of the site. We’ve toned the beige right back and switched to a dark brown, grey colour scheme. This change, although partly for aesthetics is also to do with the upcoming AudioJungle launch as I’ve been bringing certain aspects of the sites into line with each other.
Finally while going through the site we also attended to lots of little fixes. Things like the popular items page, extra referral banners, the menu structure, a revised about page, portfolio and related item listings, and more.
All in all I hope you enjoy the refreshed look and the changes that have come with it. If you’ve already forgotten how the site used to look, here’s a screenshot of its last days, for the memories box!
Now I just gotta fix up this blog to match the new look again!!
Random wins US$500 in cold hard cash, plus be profiled on this blog as soon as it sits on the homepage. Congratulations Random, and thanks for entering!
Runner Up 1: Finalist 2 by Adfish
Runner Up 2: Finalist 1 by Madness
Runner Up 3: Finalist 4 by Kariminal
Our three runners up will each receive a US$100 FlashDen voucher, and will be profiled on the FD blog once it is on the homepage.
Thanks to all those that entered and donated their assets!
For all of you dying to get your hands on all these goodies to use in your FD files, the new and improved asset library will be up early next week!
As you know the team behind FlashDen also puts together blogs and sites for creatives of all fields. Some of our sites include FreelanceSwitch - the blog for freelancers and PSDTUTS - the best photoshop tutorial site around (in my totally biased opinion).
This week we’re thrilled to launch another tutorial site for web designers and developers - NETTUTS! So far the site has mostly HTML/CSS tutorials, but I’ll be getting some awesome Flash tutorials in there too. Hopefully we’ll even get a dedicated Flash tutorial site out in the future. In the meantime take a moment and head over to NETTUTS and say hello!
I’m sad to announce that we will have to re-run the asset library competition because of… cheating!! Some fiend discovered how to buck the voting system and seriously skewed our results. Under these circumstances all we can do is run the competition again. Happily, I have been assured that this time it is foolproof!!
So please vote again, as before, and the real winners will receive their glory!
Voting starts from the time of this post, and will close on the 1st of May, midnight Sydney time.
This is just a quick post to let all our authors know that as of midnight last night FlashDen’s Copyright Amnesty was closed.
From today a team of FlashDen staff will be trawling through every file on FlashDen looking for anything that is not copyright compliant. If they find a file that does not comply with copyright they will contact the author and a copyright compliant update will need to be uploaded in two weeks - or the file will be disabled. If the author has been warned about copyright violations previously their file will be immediately disabled.
Remember, if you can prove you’re not violating copyright we will immediately re-enable the file, so never fear. Otherwise, if you haven’t done already, update any file that is not copyright compliant before the FD copyright hounds find it!
Well lades and gentlemen, we had some truly fantastic entries to our latest competition.
Now it’s time for your job! Simply choose your favourite asset from the finalists below, and vote for it at the bottom of this post. Voting will end at Midnight (Australian EST time) on the 25th of April, 2008. So get voting now!
Special thanks have to be made to the wonderful authors who entered assets into this competition. Their assets will be available for download in the next few days. These guys gave some amazing assets to help the FlashDen community!
Some fiend discovered how to buck the voting system and seriously skewed our results. Under these circumstances all we can do is run the competition again. Happily, I have been assured that this time it is foolproof!!
