I put up a donations link today, and I wanted to say a few words about it. First and foremost, I want to stress that the Blender video tutorials posted on this site are provided free of charge, and you are under no obligation to pay for them. In addition, there are numerous ways to support the site that don’t involve your wallet, which I iterate below.

I started doing Blender tutorials as a way of giving something back to the community that gave me Blender. When I first started with the application, I was amazed at how full-featured and capable it was. I started by watching the video tutorials on blender.org and progressed from there to sites like blendernewbies.com and geneome.net, among others. It was these tutorials that helped get me up and running. For this reason I wanted to produce a few of my own…

From there the Blender Basics series was born. The response was tremendous, and it has developed into something bigger than I had intended, and very definitely rewarding. I hope to continue the series beyond 5 parts. Recently Part 4 was released, for a total of more than 4 hours of instruction. Part 5 is in the planning stage, and it will deal with materials.

I’d like to keep this up for a while, and I’m looking to justify continuing to spend the amount of time I’ve put in so far, which has been substantial. For that reason I am accepting donations; not to compel you to reach into your pockets, but to provide you with the opportunity if you so desire, to help support the site and the development of future tutorials. Additional tutorials are not necessarily contingent on donations, but anything you want to give will help me be able to continue devoting substantial time to the effort.

As I mentioned before, there are more ways to support the Blender Underground than monetarily. I’ve attached the text from the page About Donations below which accompanies the donations link on the side bar. I’ll periodically repost this text or something similar just as a reminder. Thanks to everyone who has supported Blender Underground thus far, with support and advice, and by donating time and/or labor toward the Blender Basics tutorials. You know who you are.

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About Donations

Blender Underground’s video tutorials are free, and you are under no compulsion whatsoever to pay for them. However producing these videos and maintaining the website is hard work. Hours upon hours of time goes into development and production of a video series worthy of Blender. If you have benefited from these Blender video tutorials, consider making a donation in an amount that is satisfying to you. Your donations help Blender Underground continue to provide you with quality video tutorials and support.

Any contribution is appreciated. For the casual user, any donation is valuable. For the corporate user, consider what this training would be worth to you in retail dollars; cut it in half, cut it in half again; consider making a donation in that amount.

 

Other Ways to Support Blender Underground

Sign up for web hosting service from Bluehost: Blender Underground uses Bluehost as a web host, and we have been very pleased with the features and services. We are also part of the Bluehost affiliate program, which pays a referral for each account sign-up that clicks through from our site. If you need a web host, or know someone who does, sign up with Bluehost through Blender Underground’s website by clicking on the banner below, or by clicking on the image add on the main page.

 

 

Bluehost is currently offering 3 terabytes (that’s right, terabytes) of transfer per month, along with 300 gigabytes of storage, for as little as $6.95 per month.

When Blender Underground’s tutorials were a news item on Blender Nation, the website was deluged with traffic. On its worst day, this was nearly 200GB of traffic in a 24 hour period. Bluehost handled it very well. The site never went down, and the downloads were available for the duration. If you want to host files, or a forum, or a blog — and you want options and flexibility, consider Bluehost. Since Bluehost uses CPanel and Fantastico, there are dozens of custom content options (Wordpress, PHPBB, Joomla, just to name a few) that install with a few clicks of the mouse.

Link to Blender Underground from your website: When you link to Blender Underground, you help increase exposure for Blender and provide access to learning tools for people who may not have heard of Blender, or may have thought 3D modeling was too hard for them.

Add Blender Underground to your RSS or social bookmarking site: Adding our website to your Bloglines, Google, Yahoo, or even your Del.ico.us or Technorati account helps increase Blender Underground’s exposure, and generates traffic for the site.

Write a review for StumbleUpon: If you’ve never heard of StumbleUpon, it’s a great way to check out the best of the web, and discover new sites that you never knew existed, as well as discover new video content. Writing a review of Blender Underground for your StumbleUpon account lets people know it’s a site worth checking out.

Review our preview video on YouTube: Since there is a 10 minute content length limit on YouTube, Blender Underground has posted a brief preview of the series on YouTube. Adding a rating or comment review of the material will help increase Blender Underground’s exposure through YouTube.

Tell your family and friends about Blender Underground: Word-of-mouth is a great way to increase exposure to Blender. By steering them to our website, you’re providing them with the tools to learn a powerful and full-featured (not to mention free) 3D modeling and animation package.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Web Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.