Speaking of that, why isn’t there a link to Blendernation featured in a prominent spot on BA’s front page?
I mean it’s the major news site for Blender users, and this is the major community site, and both are run by the same person.
And exactly that is one (among other ) reasons why I respect @bartv and other people who treat things like this.
Their ability to keep things separate.
IMHO it’s a sign of good manners and seriousness. (That might not be the best word to describe it in the English language. But I hope you get what I’m meaning.)
When I first relaunched the site I didn’t want to change too many things at once, and I also didn’t want to link the sites too strongly. A few months ago I made a first small change to the BlenderNation homepage by adding a ‘Featured on Blender Artists’ block:
Perhaps the time has come for a subtle link back to BlenderNation from here too. I don’t have too many options to add something very visual, what comes to mind is just a small ‘Blender News’ link at the top of the page? Alternatively I could add something to the ‘Friends of Blender Artists’, but the news would appear only part of the time which might be a little hard/odd.
Thank you! 
I like to think of it more from a perspective of ‘what is useful for the Blender community’. I’ve been hanging on Instagram more this week and was surprised by the amount of new Blender users who still hadn’t heard of Blender Artists and BlenderNation. So there’s still work to be done!
Good point there.
I don’t have much insight to all of this social media stuff. BA is pretty much the only site I am communicating through but I can imagine that this ‘old timy’ forum might not be the first thing a younger generation will discover.
That said, how do you think about a curated link list as guidance to the Blender ecosystem. A pinned post, maybe in the support section? The “Orange Pages of the Blenderverse”, a place where we can link new folks to when they are out for the ride that Blender is.
Quick mockup - how about something like this? It would be unobtrusive until you click it, and when you do it gives a rich overview of the latest stories:
(Please ignore the fonts - I grabbed that from BlenderNation)
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Elegant. I like it.
Edit: Wait… Second thought. That wouldn’t show up as nice/ prominent on mobile devices, which I believe are vastly spread for browsing BA.
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Mobile is definitely something to be considered but it’s still ‘only’ 10% of the total traffic, so I think it’s ok to push that to ‘V2’ for now.
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Oh, ok. Nice to hear that most Blenderusers are still using real computers like proper human do. But then again it’s not that surprising at all.
P.S.: To avoid cracking our raw egg friends. I said proper human with a friendly, humoures smile.
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I now have a working prototype here on Blender Artists. If anyone is interested in helping me test, let me know and I’ll whitelist the feature for you!
Shure, anything in particular we should watch out for?
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Great, I have added you (I think ;-). Please reload the page and check for the ‘Blender News’ menu at the top.
Just keep using it and see if the layout looks okay and if everything works as expected.
Known issues for now:
-
News will only update when you visit another page. I don’t ‘push’ news yet.News is now auto-refreshed. - Every now and then the newsfeed fails to load.
- If the ‘Blender News’ item disappears from view and re-appears, the news menu is not re-attached.
- There’s no ‘dark’ theme yet.
Would be happy to test it too.
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Great, I added you. Reload the page to see the new menu.
Count me in.
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Great, I added you. Reload the page to see the new menu.
Do you mean the first two news items? What happens when you open them?
Just the hyperlink https://www.blendernation.com/2019/04/24/behind-the-scenes-heroes-of-bronze-before-the-storm-eevee-trailer/?utm_source=blenderartists&utm_campaign=ba-header&utm_content=item-1
and a blank page
if I click this link itself it opens correctly…
I can’t reproduce that. If you paste that link into your browser, does it work?