Tag Archive for 'support'

Introducing Plus+ Memberships!

Published on April 3, 2012 in Major Updates. 6 Comments Tags: , , , .

It’s been 4 years since OpenProcessing started its life as a community platform for Processing users and in this time period, I tried to provide most of the fundamental functionality that is necessary to create an open source sharing platform. From time to time, I received requests to allow private sketches, being able to select different licenses. I also observed that many people started using their profile page as their professional portfolio. Some professors also asked if they could create a private classroom, hide/source sketches to challenge students. To cater these requests, now OpenProcessing provides Plus+ membership option, similar to Github and Vimeo, providing these benefits:

Plus+ membership:

  • No ads!
  • No ads on your sketches and portfolio
    Your portfolio and sketches will be ad-free to other users as well. This allows you to keep your portfolio page any clutter free and purely focused on your sketches.
  • Private sketches
    Allows you to hide your sketches from public and share them with only the people you want via private URL
  • Custom license options
    You can change the Creative Commons license of your sketches, allowing you to select a specific CC version or define your own license.
  • Show/hide source code
    This is especially helpful if you are teaching a class on Processing and want to create challenges for your students, or if you want to copyright your sketch.
  • Bigger uploads
    30mb limit instead of standard 10mb. Since, you know, hosting costs.. You can read more about this on a previous post.

Professor Plus+ membership includes all the benefits above and the extra features is catered more towards professors teaching Processing in a class:

  • Private Classrooms
    This is a good option if you would like to keep your class activity private on the website, or if your institution doesn’t allow you to publicly share your class materials online.
  • Free Plus+ membership to all students
    so that your students can have more flexibility to upload bigger sketches, private sketches, hide source code until finals, etc.

Besides all the benefits above, you will be supporting OpenProcessing to cover its costs and continue its service without interruptions. This is still a very niche community and your support by being a Plus+ member will help this website provide a vimeo-like quality. I spent countless nights and weekends to develop this website over these past 4 years and it came to a point that it is both costly and time-consuming to maintain the website without your support. So I invite you to be a Plus+ member to show your support and enjoy the benefits provided above!

Please let me know if you have any comments about this major update to OpenProcessing.

 

On the weeks ahead: The Road Plan

Published on January 17, 2012 in Major Updates. 8 Comments Tags: , .

I am here to announce a great news, mostly for me, and that effects OpenProcessing users as well. I quit my daytime job to focus on my own projects, OpenProcessing being the main one. From today on, I am hoping to be way more active on updating and improving the website, and supporting the users of the site.

Here is a quick road plan of what is to come:

  • new navigation
  • collections will be open to public (instead of  ’request via email’).
  • better user thumbnail integration (gravatar being optional).
  • some other improvements for performance and security.
  • migrating to a new server (faster, better)..
  • follow user functionality.

In addition to these, there is another main point that I will be working on. That is, to start opening the channels for users to donate, as well as subscribe, etc. In the last three years, OpenProcessing grew tremendously, and exceeded 15k+ registered users, hosting 30k+ sketches, and serving to 3k+ unique users a day. So far, I had been supporting the website financially, but the demands of the site started to exceed my personal budget. I wasn’t also able to commit enough time to maintain the website on a frequent basis. What started as a school project turned out to be a long-living and well-loved website, but now this baby needs adult-level attention.

Now that I will have way more time to focus on OpenProcessing, my hopes for the coming weeks are that: I can leverage enough income through the site to continue maintaining the site and provide hosting without any charge to any users.

So, please high five with me for the good days ahead, in which the users of OpenProcessing will have a better experience while providing support and ownership to the site. Please let me know of any comments or ideas you could have.