Anima

Here’s how to use this blog:

Readers:
Read away! Please feel free to comment. If we’re doing something wrong, or there’s a better way, or you just have questions – leave a comment.

Commenters
Our comments are set to be held until moderated, because there’s a lot of spam. But once you’re approved you can post instantly from then on. My job isn’t to edit this blog, my job is to make things. So if you type “great blog” I’ll probably just spam it along with the 12 other random comments I got that week. If you seem to be directly addressing the content of the post, I’ll generally approve your post (these days, spam tends to dump in comments from other technical blogs. So if it’s off topic: it’s fishy!). I tend to just skim new comment notices in groups, once a week, to see if any are on topic. You could also just put something like “(hey warren, this isn’t spam)” at the top or bottom and it’ll catch my eye.

Joiners
If you’d like to step up and contribute posts to the blog, send me an email with a little background on who you are and what you’d like to contribute. Informal is better. I think it’d be cool to add random strangers from the internet. As long as you genuinely just want to help spread info (no fair promoting your personal projects or services).

Writers:
Please try to explain why you like something you’ve found. If you just want to dump a link and move on, at least add some kind of note about what you’d use it for.

Ideally, write up steps that explain how to set it up and how to make at least one quick example of it. Maybe note some obscure options that caught your eye, and post any questions you have. And always use exact names! Think of your post as something to help someone who just started using the program yesterday (don’t assume they know how to find something, or could guess that you meant “paint effects” when you said “brush fx”.)

– If you’re creating a new post: keep a text backup of it on your computer (just in case someone else deletes or edits the post). Check mark all the appropriate categories (usually “Maya” “how-to”). Try to tag the keywords that someone might use to search out your post a year from now (you might have posted about paint shoots of grass. So the keywords should have “plant growth” as well as “grass”, and maybe the name of the site where you got the tutorial. Plus maybe any class, famous person, or concept you mentioned.)

– Feel free to edit existing posts if you find something wrong, or want to add more text at the end. Feel free to add tags and checkmark more categories. If you do change the text, add a note to the body with your name. (and if you’re deleting stuff, save a text document just to be safe. If someone comes back and points out that your edits are wrong, it’d be nice if you could just revert to what you started with).

– if you made a quick render, embed it. Feel free to post a short 10 second video to our YouTube Account. Feel free to record a quick Jing or Camtasia screen capture instead of writing up steps.