Just a little over a year ago I welcomed you all to tiDev with the following vision:
TiDev is a new independent blog bringing news, rumors, tips & tricks, reviews and more on Appcelerator’s Titanium platform and Alloy framework for building cross platform native apps.
Evaluating our first year
Instead of celebrating our first anniversary, I’ve been evaluating the past year with some of tiDev’s authors and readers. Clearly tiDev has quickly grown into an important place for Titanium developers to find news, tips and we’ve been providing coverage and roundups of several conferences.
Chicken & Eggs
However, there have been two areas in particular where we don’t fully live up to our ambition and I can quote both of them from the same welcome message:
Contributors
TiDev was set out to be for and by developers:
TiDev is both for and by developers. Our team is a group of experienced Titanium developers, mostly certified and many Titan. Do you want to contribute?
Unfortunately, most blogs in the last 6 months have been from myself and Jeff Bonnes’s This Week. The good news is that this means we all have plenty of work to keep us entertained, but to keep up the quality and relevance of tiDev we need to have more people involved.
Content
Our ambition was to be the place to stay up to date:
It’s our ambition to be the place for both beginning and experienced Titanium developers to stay up to date with everything going on in the Titanium-sphere.
Originally the idea was for tiDev to grow into a kind of MacRumors for Titanium. A site you could rely on not to miss the smallest bit of news around Titanium. Even though tiDev is a pretty strong brand after year, we clearly underestimated the amount of work it would be to live up to this ambition.
tiDev 2.0
So what’s the plan and why did it require a new WordPress theme?
The problem
Both areas are very much related of course. With fewer contributors, you get less content. So, we need to make it easier and more attractive to contribute and at the same time; try to depend less on the availability of us as busy developers.
The solution?
tiDev will not only visually but also content-wise transform into a more like a news stream, including both hosted articles, linked articles and other content mixed into the stream.
- After the holidays you will start seeing re-blogs, embedded videos, slides, podcasts and links mixed into the existing as well as new articles.
- Jeff Bonnes will be adding links as he monitors the Titanium-sphere daily, instead of collecting them for a weekly roundup.
- In January we’ll start mixing in automatic re-blogs from Appcelerator and Titan blogs, as well as links to updates on gitTio, announced events on Meetup.com and more.
- We’ll make it easier for visitors to contribute and for moderators to approve.
- By also reblogging content on their own sites we hope contributors feel they get a better ROI via the traffic coming from tiDev.
We hope these changes will help tiDev become an even better resource for Titanium Developers in 2015. Please bear with us while we finish the new design, restore some pages/features and set-up the bots in the next few weeks.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Comments
Cesar Estrada
Thanks Fokke… Can’t wait for the new design/content!!
John Lawson
Thanks to everyone who contributes and Fokke for taking the lead on this site. Great stuff here.
Pratik Patel
Fokke, great to hear that you and Jeff will be continuing this valuable community resource.
Fokke Zandbergen Post author
Thanks @all
@pratik, not just us I hope! Your contributions are highly appreciated!
Manuel Conde
Good to hear that. I didn’t know you want contributors. I will try to send some stuff in the future, but honestly, your tricks are better than mines. Happy Christmas, team!!
John Dalsgaard
Thanks for the splendid work you do with tiDev. It is a valuable asset to new-comers like me ;-)
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Nick den Engelsman
Very cool! Good work guys.
Christofer
This is the Titanium Website I was looking for years… Great to see it growing, thank you for running it Fokke!
pettrie
Thanks for all your hard work!
Victor Casé
Very thanks! I hope to start to contribute in 2015! See u there!
Nelson
Hi Fokke. Thanks a lot to you and Jeff because of you, we have learnt a lot about Ti and we managed to delover our projects. I’m new to Titanium but in my learning process I have recollected a few very basic but useful tips and would like to help TiDev to grow, do you think it’s worthy to write and share those tips or could the web full of such basic tips?
Fokke Zandbergen Post author
@Nelson, you’re always welcome to send guest blogs to mail@tidev.io. We love short, practical blogs!