163 lines
6.9 KiB
Markdown
163 lines
6.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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author: 1
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caption: "Your new login background for the month of December"
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date: "2017-11-30"
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intro: "This is your monthly roundup of the freesewing news of the last four weeks, and a look at what lies ahead in the next month."
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title: "Monthly roundup - November 2017: Benjamin, on-boarding, showcases, and our on-demand tiler"
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---
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This is your monthly roundup of the freesewing news of the last four weeks, and a look at what lies ahead in the next month.
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## Looking back at November
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November has been busy around here. While lot of the work has been happening behind the scenes
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-- more on that in December -- there's also a list of things that are already rolled out.
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Here's the most important changes:
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### Meet Benjamin
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First up: a new pattern. The Benjamin Bow tie is [now available](/patterns/benjamin) in beta.
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Benjamin is a bow tie, and as I explained in [the announcement blog post](/en/blog/benjamin-bow-tie-beta/)
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this release is kind of a big deal.
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That's because it's the first ever pattern to have been contributed by the community.
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More specifically, it was [Wouter](/users/xdpug) who designed and programmed the pattern.
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So shout-out to him for being the first person to contribute a pattern. And if you
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[hang around in the freesewing chat room](https://discord.freesewing.org/),
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you know that he's already started working on his next pattern.
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### Better user on-boarding
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I've changed the sign-up flow a bit to help people discover all the options they can set in their account.
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The change is two-fold. First you are now auto-magically logged in
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when you click the email confirmation link for your account.
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Second, we send you to the welcome page and guide you
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through a few steps to finalize your account setup. Specifically:
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- Configure your units
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- Configure your username
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- Configure your profile picture
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- Configure your social media accounts
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(More on that last one later in this post)
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All of these settings are available in [your account](/account), but people
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frequently don't realize that.
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With the new sign-up flow, that should no longer be the case.
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> ##### Hey, I never got a handy welcome page like that
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> At any time, you can go to [the welcome page](/welcome)
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> to check or update your account settings.
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### Mixed units warning
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One of the issues that drove the changes to the on-boarding of new users was the
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issue of mixed units.
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Mixed units is when your account is configured in metric, but your model is set
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to imperial (or vice-versa).
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This is supported. If you make things for other people in other parts of the world,
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this flexibility is handy.
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But it's a rather niche scenario, and more often than not it's due to the user not
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realizing their units are set as they are.
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So now, when you draft a pattern with mixed units, we'll show you a warning box to make
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sure that you do actually intend to use mixed units.
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### Per-pattern default seam allowance
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The roll-out of Benjamin raised another issue: standard seam allowance.
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For a bow tie, the current standard seam allowance (1cm for metric, 5/8" for imperial)
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is too large. So Wouter wanted some way to change the standard seam allowance.
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So, that's what we implemented. Going forward, patterns can set the standard seam allowance
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(for both metric and imperial). If they don't, we revert to 1cm|5/8" as before.
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Note that this is only the default seam allowance. When you draft a pattern you can still
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set the seam allowance to whatever you like.
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### Social media accounts
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If you clicked the link to the welcome page, or if you check out the
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settings in [your profile](/profile) you'll see that you can now enter your
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username for a few other sites:
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- Twitter
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- Instagram
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- GitHub
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No need to worry, [your privacy is in good hands here](/blog/privacy-choices/).
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I am not interested in collecting your data, and the only reason
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this is here is because people [asked for it](https://github.com/freesewing/site/issues/184).
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![After Quentin added his Instagram and GitHub accounts to his settings, his comment now have links to those accounts])comments-social.png)
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Links to your social media accounts will appear on your profile page and along your comments.
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### More showcases
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We've added a bunch of new [showcases](/showcase) this month.
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Every maker that has one or more showcases here on the site has their own page
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that lists all their showcases.
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This month, we've updated those pages with links to the blog and/or social media
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accounts of these makers.
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The idea is that people who feel you've made a cool thing can find out a bit more about you.
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### Referrer policy, or why you never get any visitors from freesewing.org
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We've rolled out the strictest referral policy: `no-referrer`. It blocks all referrer information.
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This means that if you run Google analytics -- or some other website statistics tool --
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on your blog or website, you won't see traffic from freesewing.org.
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That doesn't mean that people aren't clicking links to your blog, but we simply
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block the referrer header from being set, so Google has no idea where people come from.
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Why you ask? Because privacy.
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### On-demand tiler
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When you draft a pattern here, you can download it in a number of formats, all neatly tiled
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so you can print them.
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You can also download the SVG source code to make further changes to the patterns.
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But once you have made those changes, there's no easy way for you to get it as a printable PDF.
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Well now there is. We've added [an on-demand tiler](/tools/tiler) to the site that does just that.
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Upload your SVG, pick the format of your choice, and we'll tile it for you.
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## Looking ahead to December
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I had hoped to release my winter coat pattern during November, but alas that didn't work out.
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I'm actually still making it, and when it's ready there will be a few tweaks required to the pattern
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before I can release it.
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But that news will have to play second fiddle to our wrap up of the year
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(traditionally on December 10th here). It's not just about what happened over the last 12 months,
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we'll also be rolling out some changes to safeguard the future of this project.
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10 more sleeps :)
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