Martin Sojka's Blog at LumberJocks.com

LJ Woodworking Awards - Summer 2009 #1: Announcement

Martin Sojka — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:28:11 GMT

10 Chances to win fantastic prizes in the 2009 Summer Awards!
It’s the awards time again, but this time with a twist! Just one category…

LumberJock Garden Bench – Whether you live in an apartment or on a grand estate a garden bench is the perfect place to sit, relax, and savour life’s gifts. Create the ideal bench for your outside environment and join our Summer Awards! Be sure to describe why you selected the design and show us the finished product in its new home.

... and ten prize winners:

1st place – 5-Piece Picture Frame Bit Set & Build-A-Box Value Package by Eagle America
2nd place – Archive DVDs by Fine Woodworking
3rd place – Stock Electric Branding Iron by Custom Branding Iron
4th place – SkilSaw by Skil
5th place – Home Run Four Pak and Maple Marking Gauge by Major League Woodworking
6th place – BowlSaw by Steussy Creations
7th place – $75 Certificate by Lee Valley
8th place – Lit-ion Power Cutter by Skil
9th place – Lit-ion Screwdriver by Skil
10th place – $25 Certificate by Lee Valley

Not everyone can be “the best” but everyone do try their best, for this reason Passion for Wood will offer one random winner their wonderful set of DVD's to help you learn more about the art of woodworking!

The entry deadline is July 31, 2009 at 3 PM CDT and you can enter the Awards page here.

Good luck!

3rd International Day of the LumberJock

Martin Sojka — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:19:06 GMT

As Debbie mentioned in the latest eMag, we have declared June 12th as The International Day of the LumberJock. This happened in 2007 when we reached 1,000 members, just 2 years ago. Fast forward to today and we are more than 10,000 members strong. Unbelievable…

I had no time to post frequently in the last few weeks. I returned from Yemen two weeks ago and am still catching up. And as this site grows leaps and bounds I find myself spending much more time on the maintenance and support than on developing new features (the part that I enjoyed most). However that’s the best part of this long-term project – I’m getting experience in so many different areas.

The most important truth that I learnt to accept during these years is that you cannot please everybody ;)

I’d like to thank our team on this special day. Judie is doing excellent job on the advertising front and her efforts are starting to pay off, Michal is managing GardenTenders and HomeRefurbers with a dedication and always optimistic Debbie is the best motivator you can find – believe me ;)

I’m just glad that most of you decided to keep this going despite it’s obvious growing pains. I want to assure you that I’m reading all the feedback (suggestions, complaints, tips…) each day and am trying to stay on top of things. Most of the frequently discussed major feature requests (groups, attachments, ignore list) are already on my list and I’d like to deploy them one by one this year. However it seems like there are always more urgent updates that have to be done…

... like fighting the spammers right now ;) I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I added another step into the registration process today. No account will be activated without an email verification anymore. Let’s see how this helps.

Dan posted an idea about the Addictive shirt design today. I liked it so much that I decided to design it and add these shirts to our apparel store. If you like it as well feel free to buy one for you ;)

Last but least, I want thank all of you for making this site what it is!

And you should really start designing a nice garden bench instead of reading my ramblings because Summer Awards are coming ;)

New Ultimate RSS Feed

Martin Sojka — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:08:22 GMT

Hey, this new feature will please all you RSS fans. Yesterday, I added one new RSS feed that combines Projects, Blogs, Forums and Reviews feeds into one ultimate RSS stream. This was one of the most requested features for some time and now you can subscribe to the LumberJocks All Posts feed here

You can find a link to this new feed in a new set of icons/buttons on the home page:

As you can see there are also direct buttons to our Facebook page, Twitter page as well as Flickr group.

Enjoy and don’t forget to update your RSS readers ;)

Short And Classy Personal Links

Martin Sojka — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:07:32 GMT

This may appear to be a small 5 minute job, however this upgrade took me a number of hours…I hope you enjoy the shorter LJ links:

Yes, all personal LJ links have been changed from lumberjocks.com/jocks/nickname to lumberjocks.com/nickname format. This is also reflected in your personal projects, blogs etc. links (ex: lumberjocks.com/nickname/blog).

Old links will still work to ensure backwards compatibility.

I’m off to update my email signatures now…

Happy 3rd Birthday, LumberJocks!

Martin Sojka — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:02:26 GMT

Yeah… it’s party time. Today is LumberJocks Birthday!
Our site is 3 years old, or should I say 3 years young?

Who remembers those first months?

I prepared a small gift for all of you. Internals of the pictures management – that you can see when adding new project, review or workshop – are revamped. I will use this updated system for the planned attachments feature. In addition to this I raised the number of pictures per project from four to six.

I was thinking how we can celebrate LJ birthday together. As you may know, the reviews are still far behind the projects, blog entries and forum topics. Currently there are 612 reviews total and it would be nice to get closer to 1,000. So the game is to post a review of your most used tool. How many reviews can LJs post per day???

You can also participate in Joe’s (trifern) Name That Turn contest. He is donating his latest hollow form to the Lumberjock who comes up with the best name. How cool…

Last but not least, you may also consider a birthday donation if you enjoyed using LJ.com in the last year. It’s always appreciated ;)

Thanks for your continuous support and encouragement.
You keep making this site better and better each day.

As always, keep posting!

LJ Woodworking Awards - Winter 2009 #5: WINNERS ANNOUNCED

Martin Sojka — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:58:10 GMT

Our great Winter 2009 LumberJocks Woodworking Awards are over so it’s time to officially announce the winners. The winning projects were selected from 106 total submissions in an online voting held from February 1 to February 7. 240 votes by 135 voters were cast during this period. And the winners are…

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BEST OVERALL LUMBERJOCK

1st Place
GaryK (247 points)

2nd Place
Ohad Milner (221 points)

3rd Place
Roger Gaborski (191 points)

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A KNOT LIKE NO OTHER

1st Place – 182 points

2nd Place – 137 points

3rd Place -119 points

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A SECRET COMPARTMENT

1st Place – 177 points

2nd Place – 107 points

3rd Place – 85 points

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Click here to see the complete results.

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I’d like to thank our sponsors for their support:

Dovetail Spline
Fine Woodworking
Steussy Creations
Swing Paints

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And following are the three lucky winners of our stylish LJ shirt (randomly selected from all the voters):

Canexican
Jayjaylove
mrtrim

Congratulations, everyone! I’m going to PM the prize winners shortly.

THANK YOU LUMBERJOCKS! I’m already looking forward to the next Awards edition in the summer… You? ;)

LJ Woodworking Awards - Winter 2009 #4: Cast Your Votes

Martin Sojka — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:48:06 GMT

WOW… what a competition – this is going to be tough voting. We have 58 entries in A Knot Like No Other and 48 entries in A Secret Compartment category. And now it’s time to pick your top 5 list in both categories and cast your votes (and don’t forget that three lucky random voters will win our stylish LumberJocks Shirt).

Voting deadline is on February 7th at 3 PM CDT.

Also, if you who have submitted an Awards entry, you will notice that your project is not listed when you make your selections. (You are not allowed to vote for yourself.) So don’t panic when you do not see your entry in the voting list – others can pick your entry without any problems.

The results will be announced on February 8th.

Click on the big VOTE AND WIN button on the Awards pages to cast your votes now.

GOOD LUCK!

LJ Woodworking Awards - Winter 2009 #3: Only 3 Days Left To Enter

Martin Sojka — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:15:32 GMT

Hey… just a friendly reminder to all who want to submit the entries to our Winter Awards. There is just one 3 days left – entry deadline is January 31, 2009 at 3 PM CDT.

We have 41 entries in A Knot Like No Other and 34 entries in A Secret Compartment so far – can we make it 50 in both? ;)

New LumberJocks Widgets For Your Website

Martin Sojka — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:04:51 GMT

As you may already know I used several 3rd party services to power LumberJocks.com widgets. Well I finally had time to design and code following two essential widgets myself:

Latest LJ Projects

Nice way to display latest LJ projects on your website or blog. Just go to the projects page, scroll down and click on GRAB WIDGET button.

You can see it in action on Al's website and Marc's blog.

Latest Personal Activity

Great for showing your latest LJ activity on your separate website or blog. Just go to ‘My Home’ page, scroll down and click on GRAB WIDGET button.

You can see it in action on Tony's website.

Both widgets are available in a narrow as well as wide format and they are IFRAME based – no flash, no proprietary formats… so they should be easy to implement if you control code of your website/blog.

Enjoy ;)

Project Pictures Upgraded

Martin Sojka — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:30:43 GMT

Hey, I hope you will enjoy a brand new update of our project pages. When entering a project page you will immediately see a larger version of the main picture. And the best thing is that this larger picture is not cropped anymore. Also, there is a list of all project pictures in a thumbnail format. Just click on any of the thumbnails to view enlarged version of that picture:

Zoom Pictures button opens a slideshow view of the high-resolution project pictures.

In addition to this update I also increased a number of pictures per project from three to four.

Enjoy ;)