A new year, a new tiDev!

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!

App imagineer: Imagining, Engineering & Speaking about Native mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium & Alloy • Meetup organizer • Certified Expert • Titan

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