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2 years of inspiration, and still counting! :-)

By milardovich | August 5, 2010

I’m not used to write personal things in this blog, but today is a very special day both in my life such as in Leonardo’s. Today is the 2nd birthday from our small portal for art, Coolshowcase.

I would like to share with you a small story about how the idea was born, how were the first months, and the actual situation and future of the website, you don’t need to read it all, but if you like our project you could write a comment in this article to give us some feedback(we would really appreciate that).

I think it was in the summer of 2007 when I met Leonardo, at the moment I was making my first steps with web programming, and he had the popular webmaster resources website webnova. I clearly remember that I was looking for some PHP scripts for some experiments I had made, and in the footer of the website I read ‘Firmat’. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing. There were other people near my area making the same thing I was making, and using the same new technologies as mine. I didn’t hesitate and I sent Leo and email making some questions of(I don’t remember very well) some linux topics. I had a quite good feedback and we were in touch for some months sending each other some emails, and sharing some useful information (and ubuntu CD’s ).

It wasn’t until May of 2007 when Leonardo proposed me to start with a graphic design showcase. He send me an email with 2 basic layouts he had made, and with an open source software called Plogger, which at the moment it wasn’t so developed like nowadays. He said it could be an easy work and I just said ‘yes’ without thinking. We met some more times in the year 2007 and we discussed about how the project should run. We also had the chance to assist to some free software and web2.0 events in some cities of Argentina, and share really good and pleasurable moments together.

It wasn’t until August of 2008 that we decided to release the project. At the moment it wasn’t so mature like here, but we had a very good reaction from the users, and we had in some months a very active comunity which were responsible to report as many bugs as they could find. After some months we could say that coolshowcase wasn’t officialy longer in Alpha status. In that year we also appeared in a lot of well-known websites, and we had a very good promotion from some other artist.

The year 2009 came with a lot of good news. One year after the official release we had more than 1.000 registered users, and always more and more works. The works were also growing and always more and more people came to the community.Today we are pleased to announce that we have; 1702 papers approved, added tools 6592 and 1668 active users. This is great!

For personal reasons we couldn’t meet each other this year, but we were always in touch and making a lot of things to improve coolshowcase. We made the resources section, a lot of radical optimization changes, our weekly journal! (released last week), and so many other smaller modifications that maybe you didn’t notice, but were made to simplify your stay in CSC.

At the moment, we have some experimental things in our test host, and we are thinking on releasing some new features, specially in the topic of usability. We don’t have actually so much time to develop like we used to have in 2007, but we’re hard-working in our free time to make CSC better and easier-to-use each day. We are totally open to new suggestions, hand-lending( ) and productive critics. If you would like to help us, don’t give us money, the best you can do for us is keep on spreading the spirit of coolshowcase to your comrades and friends.

We just want to say thank you to all of you, for using and trusting in CoolShowcase to be your daily dossis of inspiration, we hope to see you soon again in this website!

Cheers!, The CoolShowcase.com staff.

Categories: Announces, Improves, Inspiration | No Comments »