2010 August | Envato Notes

browsing posts dated:

August, 2010

This Week’s Featured Authors

by Adrian Try posted in Authors

Aug 25

2010

Here are the featured authors across all marketplaces this week. Congratulations everyone!

ActiveDen Featured Author: FlashTang

Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is FlashTang who joined in May 2009, has a portfolio of 9 items for sale and has racked up 492 sales!
View FlashTang’s Portfolio

AudioJungle Featured Author: DIPERNOISE

Our current featured author here on AudioJungle is DIPERNOISE who joined in December 2009, has a portfolio of 30 items for sale and has racked up 24 sales!
View DIPERNOISE’s Portfolio

ThemeForest Featured Author: turkhitbox

Our current featured author here on ThemeForest is turkhitbox who joined in November 2008, has a portfolio of 10 items for sale and has racked up 1054 sales!
View turkhitbox’s Portfolio

VideoHive Featured Author: Motionworks

Our current featured author here on VideoHive is Motionworks who joined in October 2009, has a portfolio of 48 items for sale and has racked up 713 sales!
View Motionworks’ Portfolio

GraphicRiver Featured Author: RZDESIGN

Our current featured author here on GraphicRiver is RZDESIGN who joined in June 2010, has a portfolio of 18 items for sale and has racked up 380 sales!
View RZDESIGN’s Portfolio

3DOcean Featured Author: Arey_l

Our current featured author here on 3DOcean is Arey_l who joined in May 2010, has a portfolio of 22 items for sale and has racked up 60 sales!
View Arey_l’s Portfolio

CodeCanyon Featured Author: QuanticaLabs

Our current featured author here on CodeCanyon is QuanticaLabs who joined in June 2010, has a portfolio of 11 items for sale and has racked up 184 sales!
View QuanticaLabs’ Portfolio

Tagged: marketplaces

New Permanent Author Rates on Envato Marketplaces!

by Collis Ta'eed posted in News

Aug 25

2010

Huge Author News!

For four years the Envato Marketplaces have helped authors around the world earn an income selling their digital wares. Along the way we’ve grown from one marketplace to seven, with more on the way. We’ve gone from hundreds of members to hundreds of thousands. Items from our marketplaces have appeared in projects for companies big and small, all around the world. And most importantly of all, we’ve had thousands of authors cash out earnings, ranging from a bit of money for a big weekend to sums in the tens of thousands of dollars a month!

It’s been an amazing ride, and here at Envato we are completely committed to making these the best damn marketplaces around. That’s why I’m very excited today to announce that as of the end of September we are rolling out some dramatically improved rates for all our exclusive authors! Continue Reading

Tagged: marketplaces

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Author Interview: Cudazi

by Adrian Try posted in Interviews

Aug 24

2010

In our second author interview, we meet Cudazi (Curt Ziegler) from ThemeForest.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from, what do you do for a living?

Creating websites has been a part of my life since Geocities was popular and a 14.4 modem was at the top of my birthday list. I’m a full-time web designer and developer in the Fargo/Moorhead area located in the northern United States. I am currently employed full-time managing corporate internet, intranet and sharepoint sites.

The rest of my free time is spent developing themes for ThemeForest and learning anything else I can along the way. Around 2006, I started to sell stock photos, 3D animations, illustrations and Flash files at the major stock agencies until focusing on the Envato network.

Which marketplaces do you belong to? What types of files do you sell?

I actually started out with a few Flash preloaders back in 2008 at FlashDen. Currently, all of my work is at ThemeForest in the WordPress & Site Template categories except for one stray photo I submitted to test the waters at GraphicRiver.

Tagged: marketplaces, themeforest

Free eBook: Marketplace Tips and Tricks

by Adrian Try posted in Freebies

Aug 24

2010

Being a marketplace author doesn’t stop when you upload your files. Successful authors realize they are their own sales manager. That’s not always easy for creatives who want to move on to the next masterpiece! So if you haven’t come across Patrik Larsson’s book “Marketplace Tips and Tricks“, you should definitely check it out.

The book is well-presented, brief enough to be usable, contains numerous tips about marketing your files, and includes a helpful interview with successful ThemeForest author Ivor Padilla. And it’s free! Download it by clicking the graphic above. Continue Reading

Tagged: marketplaces

Ask Collis

by Adrian Try posted in General, Team

Aug 23

2010

Collis is Envato’s wise and fearless leader. Every month we’ll choose a bunch of your questions, and Collis will answer them. You can add your questions to the pot by heading over to this Web form. It’s also a great place to catch his previous pearls of wisdom. Continue Reading

Tagged: envato

This Week At Envato

by Adrian Try posted in General, Team

Aug 20

2010

Well, we’ve come to the end of our first week of Envato Notes. Well, it’s only been half a week, but who’s counting. What happened at Envato this week?

Envato Turns 4

If you’ve visited any Envato site this week, you’ve heard the news already. It’s our birthday!

You may not think that four is very old, but we’ve come a long way! Check out this photo of a much younger Envato when we were operating out of a garage. You’ve gotta love the floor boards!

If you haven’t grabbed our birthday bundle yet, grab it here. There are less than four days to go!

Last year’s birthday bundle was sold 5,240 times. How many times do you think this year’s will be sold? Let us know in the comments.

Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us… Continue Reading

Tagged: envato

Thinking Sphinx and New Relic

by John Barton posted in Developers

Aug 20

2010

Over here on the marketplaces we use the really good search library Thinking Sphinx to interface between our Marketplace application and our underlying search infrastructure. We also use the really good online application performance tool New Relic to tune the site’s performance and get the most traffic served out of the least hardware. You can use this code snippet to add sphinx monitoring into new relic.

Thinking Sphinx lazily evaluates all search results. It doesn’t actually fetch the results of the query until you need to do something with the result – which is almost always iterating over the results from the view. Continue Reading

Tagged: ruby

Author Interview: Inlifethrill

by Adrian Try posted in Interviews

Aug 19

2010

Here’s the first cab of the rank in our series of author interviews. Meet Inlifethrill (Alehandro Santosh) from VideoHive.

Tagged: marketplaces, videohive

Continuous Integration & Flashing Lights

by Ian Leitch posted in Developers

Aug 19

2010

Many years ago when I first started typing incomprehensible sequences of words and characters into my computer – programming – I knew nothing about test-driven development or continuous integration. For that matter, it didn’t even occur to me that I should be writing tests for my code. Even when I first learnt of test-driven development and people began telling me to try it, I still refused! Why would I spend 50% of my time writing code that isn’t a crazy-cool feature? If your reply to that was “You wouldn’t!” then you will no doubt one day learn the benefits of test-driven development the hard way, just like a lot of test-driven converts did. In a nutshell, test-driven development is a safety blanket and when you’re running an application as large as the Envato Marketplaces it becomes a critical requirement.

Here at Envato we have two very large test suites which equate to around 6,800 tests. Then again, the marketplaces are made up of just under 19,000 lines of backend code (not including JavaScript, HTML and CSS) so we’d be crazy not to have some way of ensuring all that code is doing what it’s supposed to do. Would you want to make changes to a codebase that large without a sizeable test suite to back you up? I didn’t think so. That’s why every single time we make a change to the marketplace codebase, no matter how big or small the change; we run every one of those 6,800 tests. Continue Reading

Tagged: ruby