Duckingham Drops In

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:

New Free Sample Chapter from Unofficial LEGO Builders' Guide

Some quick news via MicroBricks: a chapter from Allen Bedford's The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide covering building in microscale is now available free (and of course, legally) online. The chapter is "Chapter 6: Microscale Building: More Than Meets the Eye" and you can download it in PDF format at http://nostarch.com/download/ulbgch6.pdf Additionally, the ULBG has a website and a blog that I have enjoyed reading. All of these are great resources for beginners - if you're one of those parents who has asked about other good resources for kids to build with, Allen Bedford's book, blog, and website are what you're looking for.

Blog Hiatus

I was hoping that I wouldn't have to do this this week, but some unforeseen circumstances are going to keep me from blogging for at least the next week. On the bright side, these are actually good distractions, and they're all LEGO-related and pretty fun - nothing bad has happened over here. Well, unless you count falling over the enormous pile of LEGO parts that I really need to put away. That left me a bit scratched up but it was a good reality check on the using-parts/putting-them-away front. Did I mention that said fall happened on Thursday and that I bought another carload of sets and parts on Saturday? Some of the stuff keeping me busy this upcoming week is preparation work for the NCLUG DGXPO display this upcoming weekend (which is part of the free and open-to-the-public Family Fun Day of this year's Digital Gaming Expo). I'll be reprising my history-of-LEGO display (in heavily modified form), showing Bionicle and Star Wars sets, and contributing buildings and crazy ideas to the town. Depending on how this week turns out, I might try to fit some other stuff in too. I'll probably feature some details on our town here after the show, but we're not revealing the big surprise in it until the event. Of course, elsewhere in the LEGO fan world, there's BrickWorld, a very large event that starts Thursday and will be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday. The name "BrickWorld" is pretty apt - builders and fans the world over are going to that, and I think LEGO itself is planning a few things for BrickWorld. If I lived near the greater Chicago area, I'd definitely be there instead. To see me, my models, and my fellow LEGO User Group (LUG) members, stop by Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday the 21st between 10 AM and 4 PM. To visit BrickWorld, you need to buy tickets at the door during the public days, which are Saturday the 21st from 10am to 4pm and Sunday the 22nd from 10am - 3pm. For coverage of BOTH events this weekend, keep LMOTD in your feed reader and tune in to LAML Radio, which is already gearing up for BrickWorld with interviews related to the event. In the days and weeks to come, LAML Radio will be featuring coverage of both shows. I'm also planning on plugging photos from both events here at LMOTD over the following week (I make no guarantees on the quality of the NCLUG photos this time out - Joe Meno's usually the one who gets the good photos at NCLUG events, but he's covering BrickWorld for BrickJournal instead). Oh, and Happy Father's Day, everybody! I hope you're having a great weekend and can join one of these fan events for some fun next weekend too.

Finding LEGO Events

One of the things that I've been meaning to do here for a while is produce a solid calendar of LEGO-related events. Right now, there is no centralized online calendar for finding out about events in your area (or areas where you may be traveling). I'm not quite ready to try to tackle this yet, but there are two calendars online now that are both incomplete but useful already. The online calendar for BrickJournal magazine has many events listed, including all of Nathan Sawaya's museum displays. BrickJournal only lists events open to the public. Trains-N-Town has a calendar of LEGO town/train events that are open to the public. Although this is only for one type of layout, it's a very exciting theme and we've featured many of the LEGO Users Groups who put on displays announced at TNT on this blog before. Let me know at legomodeloftheday@gmail.com if you know of any other helpful calendars for finding LEGO events. Also, if you let me know about your LEGO-related event, I'll be happy to announce it here as well. EDIT 7/31/2008: The LEGO Club website has an official calendar now too. That link is US-only but I suspect it will redirect to similar pages in other countries (I'm pretty sure the LEGO Club is international).

Official Ads - Now at LMOTD!

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.

Info: FAQ

Why make a site about LEGO®? There are two reasons for this. First, I've always wanted to make a site about LEGO®. A good ten years back, when I first heard about the internet, it immediately hit me that this would be a great medium for sharing LEGO® creations with other fans. I quickly found hundreds of other LEGO® fans who were already interested in using the web as a valuable resource – and a tightly-knit AFOL community was just out there for anyone to find. Secondly, I believe that this is one of the better hobbies for me to spend time on online. I have many ideas on websites I should start sooner or later, but this one won't be as labor intensive as some of my other "projects", and I'm sure I'll be able to make some ad revenue here (which is always good to have...) Are there other sites like this? Yes and no. There is an active LEGO® community online, but the sites in that community are not designed to be kid-friendly or accessible to the general public. There are many sites with interesting models online, but you may have to dig a bit to find models that are truly impressive. You'll probably see most of those sites linked to from here sooner or later, as I hope to be able to shine the spotlight on many impressive models with this blog. Several years ago, there was a website called "Cool Lego Site of the Week", which did similar work, but ultimately ran out of websites. If I recall correctly, the creator of that site also ran out of time to maintain it. There were also some stellar links pages assembled in the earlier days of the online Lego community, but many of those pages are gone - and much worse, many of the "cool sites" linked to by these resources have since been taken off of the internet. AFOLs, or Adult Fans of Lego, have done many great things working together at sites like Lugnet.com. Sadly, with their insistence on excluding LEGO®'s youngest and most active fans, their insistence on posters using their full names, and their insistence on using specific lingo, they are a rather exclusive community. Part of my goal with this site is to offer a less formal way of exploring fun LEGO® models online. I'll keep the terminology simple, or explain it when I use it, and I'll gladly showcase worthy models made by those under the age of 18 (even if they don't want everybody to know their full name). I hope that by working outside of the AFOL community, I'll be able to interest people who normally wouldn't pursue this hobby online. Do you collect any personal data? We use third-party online advertising through companies such as Google and Amazon. These companies use cookies (small text files that save data on your computer so that a website may "remember" you) as part of their services. These are not intrusive and pose no threat to you, your computer, or your privacy. Cookies are widely used for this purpose all across the internet. Additionally, if you comment on an entry on this site, that comment and related data (such as a screenname or e-mail address) will be kept with that comment. By posting a comment on an entry, you grant LMOTD and Google's Blogger service the rights to publish this data on the post's page (this is standard practice for blogs and shouldn't surprise anyone, but we thought we'd be clear about it). Is this site kid-safe? Although I cannot be held personally responsible for the sites that I link to (they can change their content without my knowledge at any time), I do make an effort to not post links to sites that have questionable or objectionable content on them. I also moderate all comments. These procedural precautions were decided upon with children and families in mind. If you have any suggestions on how we can be more kid-friendly, please e-mail us at legomodeloftheday@gmail.com How are models chosen? Some models are chosen out of my own personal archives (I maintain a library of LEGO® instruction manuals, books, etc), other models are chosen because they have received some buzz on the ‘web and seem like they should be mentioned. Other models are nominated from user submissions. You may read about how you can nominate a model at this link. I will also be looking for new models that may be of interest myself, and occasionally posting about models that are already famous that you might not know about. Models are not being disqualified along traditional lines - professional Lego designers will be competing with children who bought their first LEGO® set last week for the award of site of the day. Any model is eligible, regardless of the age, nationality, profession, etc, of the person who made it. Heck, I'll even take models not made by people - this is 2008, and we do have LEGO® robots that can build other LEGO® models now. I do require, however, that there is a website I can link to that has fairly reliable image hosting and that the creator of the model has a link I can feature. I WILL NOT link to webpages that do not credit a model’s builder in any way (with the sole exception of models that were commissioned for a company). I plan on using the following criteria to determine which models deserve to be spotlighted: Detail - Are small parts used to give proper detail to a model? Does a model contain researched elements? Is an unusual color scheme used? Are elements of whimsy or irony included? Ambition - How long did the model take to make? What kind of financial resources would be required to buy the parts for the model? Were specific programming or CAD techniques needed to build this model? Is it really big? Technique - Are parts used in unusual or unexpected ways? The following criteria will determine when a model is featured: Documentation - Is there a website discussing the creation of the model? Are there plenty of pictures available so that we can see everything? Are building instructions provided? Theme - Is this from an unusual theme? Is this something that has not been attempted before? How many models in the same "category" have we seen lately (I'm hoping to showcase a variety of models on the main page at any given time). Will I be informed if my model is chosen? I do not have the time to track down the creator of every model featured. I recommend subscribing to our RSS feed to keep track of whether or not a model has been mentioned. Additionally, we may cause a short surge in traffic to your website or Brickshelf page on the day your model is featured. It is not a problem, however, for me to reply to an e-mail in which a model was nominated. If you nominate one of your own models, I'll have your e-mail address handy to let you know that you have been featured.