Posted by
Dan
at
3:37 PM
As you may have seen us previously mention, we're hoping to make a real effort to fix the various problems this blog has seen recently. One element of this is that we're rethinking pretty much everything. We're not sure how much we'll change, but at the moment everything is on the table. That means it's the perfect time for you to let us know what's on your mind concerning the site - our "suggestion box" is open. What could we do better? What could we add to the site? What would you like to see? Let us know in the comments or via e-mail to legomodeloftheday@gmail.com
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Posted by
Dan
at
11:55 PM
Since we've clearly been failing at trying to catch up lately, I think it's time to fill you in on what's been going on behind the scenes.
First, we need to make our accidental February hiatus official - there's just no way we can reasonably make up the time now. We'll return to the of-the-day format in March, and actually be on time for a while.
Seeing that events in my personal life can still interrupt the blog a bit, I think it's time we look again into bringing new contributors to this blog. Let me know if you'd be interested in doing something here. While I'd like to pick off a few writers from other LEGO blogs out there (it seems there's a new one every day lately), we're open to trying out new ideas as well - if you have any suggestions, feel free to send them in to legomodeloftheday@gmail.com
We're actually already looking into some new features, but you know how us LEGO fans are - we like to stop writing and actually build something once in a while. It's better to have a few more people involved and more ideas in the pipeline.
I prefer not to bore my readers with my personal life, but here's a quick rundown for the interested: about a week after my hand got better, I came down with a really nasty sinus infection. Somewhere in the middle of that, my main laptop died. After warranty-covered repairs were done, it came back without an operating system - I've been trying to get my regular tasks going in Ubuntu over this past week.
Oh, and did you know I build? I'm planning on debuting a sculpture and some new Cafe Corner style town models at this year's LEGOPalooza - where I'm also coordinating a town/train layout. If you're near Chapel Hill, NC, USA on March 5th or 6th, you might want to check it out.
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Posted by
Dan
at
2:36 PM
I've generally tried to avoid posting about the history of this blog, for the obvious reason that we're called "LEGO Model of the Day" but haven't been truly daily in any consistent manner until fairly recently. From time to time (especially at LEGO events, which I've been increasingly active at since starting this blog), I've been asked about how long LMOTD has been around. As of right now (I've scheduled this post in advance to be live exactly 3 years after my first model post), LMOTD is three years old.
It's been an exciting couple years. At first, I wasn't really sure if I could truly add something insightful to another LEGO model every single day. I've brought in help to keep the blog going, I've experimented with the format a bit, but in the end what made the magic happen was some changes in my personal life (I was a college student and a "LEGO community outsider" when I started LMOTD, now I'm a cubicle dweller and regular AFOL). The looser formats I've experimented with kept this blog going in leaner times, and I'm happy to say that 2010 is the first year that we're on track to truly deliver a fresh post about a LEGO model every day.
LMOTD hasn't been a runaway success story. I'm happy to have roughly 500 visitors per day (even if most of them are search engine hits), and I do feel like I've created something of value to LEGO fans. If nothing else, LMOTD has created a library of easily searchable models and techniques that is appropriate for all ages. It's thrilling to try looking up a technique, and then find that this blog is the only place where it was described well enough to turn up in a search result (although most of the pictures are hosted elsewhere and other people discuss many of these models, few people write in as much depth as I do here). I had originally hoped to be more than that, but as other LEGO blogs grew, disappeared, came into being and otherwise changed over the years, I've found that all the voids I wanted filled have been filled.
Thank you for a fun three years - let's hope there are many more to come! |
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Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
2:40 PM
Earlier this week, Google announced that Blogger would finally be supporting tag clouds. I tried experimenting with this for a little bit yesterday (in between adding links to our latest BrickFair page) - and it looks like there was a brief incident (about a day or so) where the tag cloud was unintentionally live in the sidebar.
This looked pretty bad in the layout, but I thought it was interesting enough to post here as a regular entry. There is no automatic "only use the x most used tags" option, but I whipped up a quick cloud grabbing most of tags (or labels) that were used here 3 or more times and most tags that represent themes, scales, etc.
Here's the current result:
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Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
2:06 PM
If you've visited this blog in the past month or so, you've probably noticed that we haven't been posting much lately. There are actually some good reasons for this. There are some behind-the-scenes changes going on - long story short, I'm slowly making this more of a community site, with the ad revenue here supporting contests which will be announced in the months to come (we've already begun planning the first - I'm hoping to have an announcement to make about that sometime this summer).
While we do want to keep this blog going while we're bringing in more people and planning contests, we all have other things going on that are pulling us away from posting here. Matthew (Brickapolis) is in a bit of a "real life" crunch time, and recently became a man of mystery. Chris (Duckingham) recently started a phenomenal LEGO-based webcomic called "The Brick Side". I (Dan) recently got through some large school projects, graduated college, and started working at a promising start-up. A new LEGO store in our area is further distracting Matthew and me from blogging (what sort of coverage/appearances/volunteering we do for the grand opening festivities remains to be planned).
So here's what's going on right now: We'll try to post models when we can, but no promises that we'll actually be daily for the next few weeks. I'm currently looking for more LEGO fans to help write the site - we're looking for people knowledgeable enough about LEGO to write long-winded blurbs discussing techniques and history alongside daily models (we want to make sure we keep the same level of quality in future posts, even as we keep trying to increase the variety and frequency of posts). I'm going to continue editing and scheduling the blog - we're looking for contributors to write about models and LEGO news and then save the posts as drafts in Blogger. If you are interested in writing here at the LMOTD blog, send me an e-mail at legomodeloftheday@gmail.com - I'll try to be in touch with you ASAP.
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Posted by
Duckingham
at
10:39 PM
Hello fellow FLMOTD readers!
When Dan sent out his plea for help I was eager to volunteer. I am a 30-something life-long lover of LEGO and have recently begun making an extended effort to get involved in the online LEGO community. I have a beautiful, supporting wife and 4 kids ages 1–7, who each have a particular fascination with the plastic brick (okay, so my 1-year old just likes sticking them in her mouth ;D )
I've been developing a side business as a LEGO freelance artist as evidenced by my creations on my personal site Duckingham Design, but my day job is as a webmaster. I like to think of both jobs as excuses to play. :)
I love to look at, learn from, and comment on what other people are building, and have been looking for an outlet to do so without creating confusion on my own site by mixing my stuff with everyone else's. I appreciate Dan for giving me the opportunity to help keep FLMOTD continue to be that daily dose we've all come to love and appreciate!
For the curious, here's a taste of some of my personal projects:
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Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
7:58 PM
I just found out that Monday's post is not showing properly in the RSS feed. For those of you watching the feed, some photo links were added to the TCBX show entry. In the future, I'll have to remember to write fresh posts for event wrap-ups. I didn't realize that I could update a post and change the date for it to appear first on the site without the RSS feed updating properly. Sorry about that.
Thanks for all of your comments and e-mails lately - I've always thought that a blog has "arrived" when it's readership is large enough to answer questions that the blogger asks. I've been impressed by and humbled by the amount of people reading lately (in spite of my delays in posting), and I am grateful to be hearing from some of the builders I've featured about details I've overlooked or been unsure of when writing here. I've been trying to keep up with these by editing the relevant posts (the updates to the posts do generally show up in the feed, but they won't show as unread again if you've already read the posts - at least in Google Reader, anyway).
As for tomorrow's (Tuesday's) post, I have to pick a model from the e-mail pile yet. I have a feeling that it'll be fairly late in the evening before I finish writing about one, but I'm looking through some models right now.
For those of you who have been able to attend some of the great LEGO-related events out there, I'd like to hear from you. I'm not happy with how long it's taken me to get some event wrap-ups done, and I'd like to get more first-person reviews of events on here. By "events", I mean fan conventions, public displays of any size, FIRST/LEGO Robotics events, contests - anything, really. I'm interested in hearing from both people who are behind-the-scenes and people who are just attending. To send in a guest post about an event (whether as an announcement beforehand or a wrap-up after-the-fact), write whatever you have to say in an e-mail to me at legomodeloftheday@gmail.com - and include the URL of where pictures/videos are if they are available. I'll format and edit a bit to make it fit in on the site (mostly I'll just be filling in links and checking for language). This is also a chance for those of you who aren't interested in maintaining a regular blog to speak up about what you've been doing in the LEGO fan community (or even just with your friends).
Lastly, if you want to find an event to attend or let LEGO fans online find out about your event, take a look at the new, improved, Google Calendar-driven BrickJournal Calendar. Separate overlays for contests, conventions, displays, fan club events, and Mindstorms/FLL events make it easy to find particular types of events. I need to get more involved with that calendar and to update my previous posts about finding LEGO events to mention it, but I fully expect this shiny new calendar to quickly become the "standard" calendar for most LEGO fan sites on the internet. If you're running an event, you should let BrickJournal know first and then announce it in a few other places, such as regional websites, websites for the featured LEGO themes (there are quite a few of these out there with various angles on covering the hobby), LUGNET (adults only - although many adults are happy to help out at events aimed at kids), offline bulletin boards in the same area of the event, and here at LMOTD. I'll continue trying to plug events here that I've seen mentioned elsewhere as well.
Thanks for reading,
Dan
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Posted by
Dan
at
11:45 AM
I'm not sure if we're going to be featuring models this week (I'll start as soon as I can), but I believe I have settled on a new format.
Many a daily TV show or radio show has gone with doing new episodes just 4 times a week - Monday through Thursday. I'm planning on trying out that pace to see if it's more manageable.
A few things this means:
- No Sunday edition - I've been using larger galleries from events on most Sundays to do a "Sunday edition" like a newspaper would. I'm going to start just mixing these in throughout the week.
- News posts will count as models - I know it's cheating, but it should help me to find the time to post something each day I should
- Robotics Monday will now be more intermittent - I'll blog a robot on Monday if there's one that caught my eye in the past week, but I'm no longer making it a hard-and-fast rule that I must have a robot featured every Monday
- Expect to not see two models at the same scale within a week - 7 days a week is often enough to mix minifigs, microscale, sculptures, Technic/Scala/Belville scale models, Bionicle people, and even Jack Stone things in a way that allows for multiple minifig-scale models in a week without becoming a minifig-scale-only site. I figure I'll now only feature minifig-scale models once per week. This should also help with the issue of overlap for the people who read this blog and some of the other LEGO blogs out there (of course, cutting back on robotics models will help there too - I don't think people realize how big LEGO Mindstorms is with people who don't generally follow LEGO).
I'm hoping to try out some polls soon as well, to get a better feel for what direction people would like to see this site go in.
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Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
9:07 PM
Edit: I've set this entry (written August 20th) to appear at the top of the page for the rest of the month. I am trying to squeeze in a few models this month, but you'll have to scroll past this post to see them (they should show up in the correct order in the RSS feed, though).
I don't think it's news to anyone at this point that I've been having trouble with posting a new model on here each day. To some extent, it's a problem with finding models that fit my self-imposed rules on variety, but a big element of it is that I've been having trouble finding the time to write on here. The time element isn't going to get any better over the next few months, so I am considering changing the title and format of this site.
Personally, I don't like that this blog hasn't been able to deliver what it promises (a fresh model pick each day). I'm grateful to have a bit of a following, but I think this blog has been a bit of a let-down. Further, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the fact that we've picked up momentum (and a bit of ad revenue) while this site hasn't been getting updated (I may assuage my guilt with a contest at some point - no plans for one yet, though).
Part of the problem is the calendar - having to dig up giant show galleries on Sundays, find an appropriate robot for any given Monday, and then spreading out all the themes fairly equally on the other days of the week.
Additionally, some of my original goals of this blog have been met by other blogs out there. As far as I know, this is the only LEGO-centric blog that aims for an all-age audience outside of the hobby, but I think a few of the other blogs out there have really grown over the past few years (yes - it's been about a year and a half since I started this blog, but I didn't mention the anniversary because we still haven't hit 365 models yet).
NXTStep has been linked from here quite a few times - they don't cover RCX-based ideas or some of the more mechanical robotics projects I've featured, but they're an excellent blog and one that's done a great job of getting kids interested in robotics. On the minifig-scale side of things, The Brothers Brick has become THE destination for MOC (My Own Creation) news and general-interest news on the LEGO company (it's aimed at adults, but most of the things featured aren't too racy or controversial). While it's a bit concerning that a handful of people on that site control what most of the big "nerd" blogs cover, I do appreciate that they've encouraged the larger sites to properly credit builders - something I had hoped to help with here. Additionally, both NXTStep and TBB have been able to appeal to people outside of the hobby without imposing a pace - I had assumed that people would be more interested in getting a small dose (a daily "fix", if you will) instead of getting multiple updates a day, but I think I may have been wrong here.
Lastly, I've noticed during the time I've been blogging here that there have been many times when I've wanted to give this blog more of a personal tone instead of a cold (impersonal), descriptive, this-is-awesome-too tone. I'd be open to considering changing the name of this blog to reflect a different pace and a more presonal angle - perhaps "LEGO® Model Offered Through Dan"? Realistically, I think that blog updates here will have to be scattershot and disappointing here for quite a while unless I decide to change the format.
Let me know what you think of all this - and I know you're out there, about 300 unique hits a day and another 55 readers subscribed to the feed. What would you like to see happen here?
(In case anyone was wondering, I'll probably skip Sunday and Monday this week and post short write-ups of models for the other days I missed sometime soon)
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Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
6:25 PM
For the sake of following my own rules on featuring a variety of models here, I like to feature a large sculpture roughly once a week. Non-traditional sculptures are allowed (it's not required that most parts are bricks) but sculptures made for the LEGO company are discouraged.
I already know about Nathan Sawaya, Sean Kenney, Eric Harshberger, Henry Lim, Dave at BrickPlayer.com, and the (dormant?) Scaled-Up Bricks blog. I'd like to feature more builders instead of just mining the same few websites over and over again when sculpture time arrives.
It's also important to me to get decent coverage of the model and the builder. Although many models are featured in newspapers, it's very rare that a newspaper reporter actually covers a model in a respectable way. I have some info on what makes a model featurable on the FAQ page.
My e-mail address is legomodeloftheday@gmail.com - please send along any links you might have to builders' write-ups of their work. Of course, I accept nominations of any sort of model, but I'm specifically running short in this department.
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Posted by
Lego Model of the Day
at
11:10 PM
I'm taking advantage of a relatively slow week here to get in some posts in advance and catch up with some much-needed site maintenance. One of the things we're now doing is displaying ads from LEGO Shop at Home's website. Some of these will be text or photo ads similar to the Amazon ads I've been running, and others will be promotional banners. Of course, this doesn't imply any endorsement or relationship between me and LEGO - I think I'd have to hire a lawyer to figure out how to precisely describe the situation - but long story short, I get 3% commission on sets sold through LMOTD. I'll be adding links to some existing entries, including them in new entries, and adding some graphical ads to the layout, but that's all that'll change around here for now.
While I wouldn't mind people stopping by here before heading to the online LEGO store, I also feel the need to point out that there are plenty of other excellent sites out there that you can also support by using their sponsored links to the LEGO shop at home site. Peeron and Brickset are both great resources to LEGO fans and you can support both of them through similar links as well. There may also be other blogs that you follow that could use your support too. As much as I like the money, it's worthwhile to support all the online LEGO-related resources we use.
Of course, the ads aren't really for you diehards who know probably know all these things already - they're really more of a way to get people who don't follow the hobby to think about perhaps picking up a few sets.
If you want to try this out, here's one of our new links: Find the LEGO bricks you need at The Official LEGO Shop!
EDIT 5/28: I have now added a banner ad to the RSS feed footer. |
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