Swooshblog

Here’s something I have to implement on LEGO Building School someday soon:

• Change the front page. Display three selections.
• Each selection represents lessons. They should go something like this: “Please select what you want to do. 101: for beginners. 201: for intermediate builders. The index: View and select from everything in the scool.”
• The first options should display a short tutorial with selected articles to read in order to get an introduction to building and navigating the community. The second one should focus on introducing the reader to useful tools and resources. The third one should open the floodgates to the Building School index.

Hm, could be really good and make the School a way better starting point with a pretty small amount of work, right?

I’m working on a new technique search engine right now, where I want to link to different places to get the pieces in a technique. This has led me to experiment with LEGO’s online PaB section. Don’t get me wrong – I love the fact that it exists, but it’s a technical fail. I sent a quick e-mail to customer service to answer a few questions. Will be interesting to see if and how they respond

Hi!

I’ve got two questions regarding the Pick A Brick-section of your website.

I create small web sites to help other adult fans of LEGO. Right now I’m putting together a technique search engine where I link to different places where one can gets the pieces for the specified technique.

I’d like to include the PaB-section of the LEGO shop, but have run into a few questions I’m hoping you could help me with:

1a. Does your affiliate offer via Linkshare also apply to shop.lego.com/pab?

1b. If so, you should be aware that the links Linkshare generates are messed up for this section of your site. You try to redirect me to the appropriate country, but something goes awry. Feel free to test the following link:

http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=V8LEs145whg&subid=&offerid=115554.1&type=10&tmpid=2294&RD_PARM1=http%253A%252F%252Fshop.lego.com%252Fpab%252F

2. Due to the way you’ve constructed the PaB section (all JavaScript without fallbacks) it’s impossible to deep link to a piece search. That’s something that can usually be pretty easily handled by making the site sense parameters. Is this something that is already implemented but invisible? If not, do you have plans to implement it?

I know these questions might be more technical than usual, so let me know if I should ask someone else. Thanks in advance for your answers.

Cheers,
Linus Bohman

I decided to update the system that many of the Swooshable apps are running on the other day. Turns out it broke one of the work-in-projects I’ve just sent out to a few people to BETA test. D’oh!

The update changed the file system, and one of the plugins I was using wasn’t prepared for that. I’ll try to fix it soon.

I’m pretty excited about the project, though. One of my biggest regrets is that I don’t live near most of the other AFOLs. I’ve only ever met two – Derek Schin and Niels Bugge – and both were awesome people. I want to meet more! But in absence of physical meetings I want to know what all of you at least look like, so I constructed a quick challenge:

1. Take a photo of yourself
2. Recreate that photo in LEGO however you wish

I think it’d be really fun to see what everyone does with this. Might be that the amount of work required is too great for this idea to take off, but we’ll see when it goes live for real. Just a few more bugs to iron out!

If you want to test it before it’s finished, just head on over to Lego Me, the beta.