To celebrate (?) this fine Friday the 13th, another of my occasional posts of links.
Muskie commented on my Youtube scenery videos post to remind me of his fascinating Miniature Painting News Aggregator, which has a neat collection of feeds from all over the place, mostly focused on miniature painting but touching on a number of other hobby elements too. The aggregator apparently started as a private project, and it’s a bit GW-centric for my personal tastes, but it can throw up some neat semi-random content. Well worth a visit, and well worth bookmarking for return visits. (Incidentially, I”ll also recommend Muskie’s Better Hobby Blogging article for those of us who blog. Full of good advice.)
We talk about design, fonts, Inkscape and related topics fairly regularly here on The Warbard, and I’ve just discovered the Lost Type Co-op, a pay-what-you-want font foundry with lots of very nice Art Deco-influenced fonts and others suitable for Interwar/Early 20th C design efforts.
Further on the design and graphics front, Fantastic Maps is, well, fantastic. Jonathan Roberts also has a great collection of Tips & Tutorials that is well worth checking out.
Last but definitely not least, the Barking Irons site has a nicely illustrated Witchlands Hovel tutorial by Tony Harwood. The Witchlands are Flintloque’s version of Russia, and Tony’s article should provide inspiration for plank-roofed rural buildings for Russia and elsewhere.
In fact, I’m going to get off this computer, get some food, then start cutting coffee stir sticks for my own version of a plank-roofed hut!
Thanks for mentioning the news aggregator, it is still a WIP. I’ve had a lot of problems with some feeds, particularly those hosted on blogspot, but I have a work around in place. I’m also bringing back a feature I miss, which may make it load even slower, but might be worth it in the eyes of most. Pinterest is the new social media darling after all…
I’ll look forward to seeing how it evolves, then.
Is Pinterest really shaping up to be a useful source of wargaming info? I had a quick look around a couple months ago when it first made the news, seemed to mostly be another source of cat macros and nothing more… — Brian
It’s 70% women or was last time they reported usage numbers. But the idea of clicking a button and sharing a picture (plus link) is pretty simplistic and appealing. You can subscribe to just boards, even via RSS, so it has potential. It certainly proved a lot more useful than Tumblr which is generally a mess. Most Tumblr users don’t have the discipline and focus to stick to one topic, plus I’ve repeatedly read that porn was a big factor in Tumblr’s success and now they can’t get rid of all the adult material that gets posted that of course isn’t the intellectual property of the poster. Pinterest doesn’t even allow nudity which Flickr does. Blogspot has adult material too. So if Pinterest can legal pitfalls and prove that they can actually make money for users, advertisers, and companies they might last.
Instagram was bought for a billion dollars and they have zero revenue. I never bothered to join or use that website. I’m not sure what it offers over a dozen different photo sharing sites. The difference between Pinterest and Flickr is, Pinterest is for sharing other people’s stuff primarily whereas Flickr is for sharing your own photos. Pinterest passes all legal responsibility off to the end user, but third most popular social network in North America, that is something Google+ can’t say and which do you think had more money and developers thrown at it.
Pinterest is pretty simple and easy to use, so I decided to use it to partially curate my news aggregator. I still have issues with thumbnails, Blogspot, and non-functional RSS feeds, but Pinterest doesn’t give me any headaches. If they used an enclosure for their RSS feeds like Flickr does, that would be even better!
I use Flickr for most of my own photos because it has a cleanest, most consistent and most user-friendly interface and layout of any of the photo sites I’ve tried. Picasa is awful, and places like Imageshack and Photobucket aren’t even in the same league.
I’ll reserve judgment on Pinterest for now, it seemed a wasteland of cat macros, images ripped off from Etsy and random internet cruft I’d already seen elsewhere when I had a look around a few weeks ago… I do like that it allows you to link back to the original source of the image, I hope the “pin this” process tries to enforce that to keep the place from being a total copyright-free wreck.
Also not sure how well “passing all responsibility off to the end user” will work. Pirate Bay gets away with that because they don’t give two shits, I assume Pinterest is attempting to be a good little corporate citizen, though. We shall see.
I totally agree about Flickr. I don’t understand why new people in the hobby continue to create Blogspot blogs and put their images in the damnedest places and expect people to actually find them using Google or heaven forbid RSS feeds.
Pinterest is for other people’s photos. The copyright issue is out there, with Pinterest INC. placing the blame/responsibility squarely on the end user in their usage agreement. I post work by other hobbyists pretty much exclusively so I don’t anticipate any problems. They also have positioned themselves far away from the adult entertainment industry and since they only host copies of images, they aren’t an avenue to pirate movies or music like torrent sites, virtual hard drives, even WordPress.com lets you upload 10 gigs of whatever you want…
Pinterest has a search feature, plus categories if not actual tags like WordPress and Flickr. It is possible to subscribe via RSS to a single pinboard, so I keep all the cats and pictures of crap I don’t care about well away from news aggregator. I unsubscribed to a whole bunch of stuff when I first joined as it knew who my Facebook friends were, now people follow me who are interested in miniature painting. Flickr is still superior if you have a bunch of your own photos you want to show off online, but if you see something cool, Pinterest is a quick way to share it and you can sync with Facebook and Twitter if you like. It was one of the tools I decided to use when I built the news aggregator. I even found a Tumblr blog worth adding as Matakashi Tea House started one…