A quick post to alert you to two fantastic community resources regarding LEGO® colours and parts which Huw Millington has now integrated to Brickset, making the world's most popular fan site about LEGO even better!
Ryan Howerter's Brick Colorstream
Remember our
discussion of Ryan Howerter's excellent resources about LEGO colours? Huw has used his photographs of LEGO pieces in every known colour on Brickset, including a new colour browser. This is fantastic news for the community as it will lessen the many mysteries and confusions around LEGO colours and their names. You'll learn lots of new things I am sure - I've already found a cool feature: you know those "Colour Families" used on the LEGO website? A dropdown in Huw's colour browser can now show you which colours are included in each Colour Family, and you can use another dropdown to filter to Current or Retired colours. Another dropdown permits you to search by colour type, so you can just look at normal ("Solid") colours or other types like Transparent or Pearl. Huw has used Ryan's images in other useful places on the site too; read more about the new
Brickset colour integration here.
But that's not all!
Swooshable
Huw has added another new function, this time from the Swooshable website by Linus Bohman. You may recall I
interviewed Linus about his site late last year. Huw and Linus have shared data in the past and now Huw has added a "Swooshable" tab to his "parts detail" pages. This links off to the equivalent page on Swooshable but also pulls some of the most useful stuff straight into Brickset - the best one being Swooshable's techniques database. This is something I dreamed of when starting New Elementary so I'm thrilled Linus has done it and Huw is giving it a wider platform.
Put simply, Swooshable contains a database of techniques developed by the community and Linus has wedded this to his parts database, meaning that if you go to a part page if that part is used in one of the techniques in the database, you can check it out with a simple click. At its most useful, this function answers the question "what cool stuff could I do with this part?", but of course a link is only provided if that part is actually used in a technique. The example below shows the entry for the 2x4 brick.
Bravo to Huw, Ryan and Linus for continuing to work together to create and share amazing resources that benefit the community.
So you write an article about two OTHER PEOPLES websites then DON'T EVEN LINK TO THEM? Gross dude.
ReplyDeleteThe article is about how Brickset has incorporated data from those sites, hence I linked to Brickset. I've written separate articles about Ryan and Linus, which are linked to above, and both contain links to their sites.
DeleteThere's a URL up there in the second paragraph :)
ReplyDeleteI'm mostly commenting because I'm amused that the colour page you've linked to is the very same one as I first navigated to when I was trying the new feature out. Gotta love that trans neon green!
Bro, don't feel the trolls. YOu have one of the best blogs. keep it up! =)
DeleteThat's spooky Neil!
DeleteNot bothered by it KuRoKun. Glad you like New E, thanks!
DeleteMay I offer some advice on a way to make the color thing even better? Provide a list of the names of all the parts in each photo, so builders can see what they're called, and what sets they came in.
ReplyDeleteThat said, what a great resource!
--Chaz Fairbanks