Blockheads: a new place to share your MOCs
Posted by Huw,
Where's the best place to share pictures of your MOCs?
In the 1990s it was Brickshelf. In the 2000s MOCPages, and in the 2010s Rebrick, but all are now either obsolete or offline, and nothing has come along to replace them.
Nowadays, most of the best builders are to be found on Flickr and Instagram but because they are general-purpose social media platforms, they are not ideal.
Having spotted an opportunity to provide something better, Galen Gidman has just launched a new site called blockheads.builders.
Galen, a web developer and LEGO fan explains, "Blockheads is a community for LEGO builders to create and share their work with the world. The past few years have seen sites, apps, and forums for the online LEGO community come and go. As it stands today there's no longer a central hub for LEGO fans. By providing a platform for builders to share their work and interact with one another, Blockheads aims to become the place for the LEGO community to gather and grow."
Personally, I think there is a gap in the market for something like this, but whether it will gain enough traction to become the place for MOCers to congregate remains to be seen. It certainly seems to have all the features needed for it to be a success, so I wish Galen the best of luck with it.
I therefore encourage you to go and check it out and see what you think. There are many talented builders using it already.
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29 comments on this article
There is also Bricksafe?
Can I use two fingers to zoom into a picture on mobile?...
Oh, no, this is disabled. Why do they all do this?
And theres me still happily loading pictures on Brickshelf......
@Brick_Master said:
"Can I use two fingers to zoom into a picture on mobile?...
Oh, no, this is disabled. Why do they all do this? "
Hi Brick_Master, Galen, owner/developer of Blockheads here. Zooming in on the images conflicts with the swipe left/right functionality. We're working on a better solution for image zooming. We had 3 different versions during our beta and none of them were right. But we know this is an area we can improve on and have plans to do so.
brickshelf's still there isn't it?
@Brick_Master said:
"Can I use two fingers to zoom into a picture on mobile?...
Oh, no, this is disabled. Why do they all do this? "
Sigh.... in fact I checked on my laptop and there is no zoom either. For a site focused on photos of finely detailed models, why would high resolution and zoom not be top of the feature list?
Plus badly implemented infinite scroll means I scroll down, click on a moc, click back, and oh, I've lost my place, back at the top again.
This is a great idea and I would really love to see a great site for MOCs, but please please think about common use cases of the *actual target audience* when putting together a site. To be successful it needs to be more than an off-the-shelf gallery plugin on top of a vanilla template.
Brickset, actually is a great example of a site that has actually been built around the features people specifically need on a lego site. It's possible, but it takes a bit of work.
Just signed up! Modeltrainman, there.
I've been using Brickshelf since 2000. Still using it to host pictures for Eurobrick posts.
Thanks for this news.
Um doesn't everyone use IG to share MOCs? Works the best.
Looks really great! I hope this works out really well!
Just created my account :-)
What about Rebrickable? There's lots of MOCS there as well as well alternative builds for current Lego models.
Still disappointed in the complete lack of coverage of the disappearance of MOCpages and with the current work on MOCshare.
Too many military builds for my liking. That's not very inspiring to look at.
@oldgrey said:
"Too many military builds for my liking. That's not very inspiring to look at."
I wish there was a site that banned stuff like that.
It’s just so boring.
@oldgrey said:
"Too many military builds for my liking. That's not very inspiring to look at."
So join and encourage others to who post less military stuff. Problem solved!
Also, by default it is filtered by users you follow, so just only follow those who build stuff you like and your good!
Is is me or halfway through, the gallery is messed up? Using Firefox here
@Chouju_X_SPAM_ said:
"Still disappointed in the complete lack of coverage of the disappearance of MOCpages and with the current work on MOCshare. "
Same.
For those unaware, there is another site in the works called MOCshare. It, too, is being developed solely by one man, and the goal is to use the MOCpages style platform, but update it for modern sensibilities. For all its faults, MOCpages was an excellent way to display creations. All your images were on one page for each MOC, and you were able to intersplice images and text for specifying details, telling stories, and just making the post really your own thing with as much creative potential as with your MOC. I spent hours on pages making them look the best they could to show off my creations the best way possible. The real downsides were that everything was always taking you to another page than just being something within the same URL, such as writing comments or zooming in on images, there was only one tag that could be added when many times more than one was needed, it was not mobile compatible, and there was only so much that the servers could handle in terms of image resolution, and that's what MOCshare aims to rectify. MOCpages was not a perfect site, in fact, it was poorly handled and Sean Kenney has ruined his reputation for letting the site die than to properly fix it after so many crashes and issues with the mailing system; regardless of his art career, he should have let someone else take it over, but in terms of sharing creations, MOCpages was the best, and from what I can tell with Blockheads, it's a weird version of Flickr and Instagram, and that is not what I would like for showcasing my creations.
Bricksafe combined with Rebrickable seems like one of the major options as well.
Yeah, uh... Rebrickable still seems fine? People are naturally going to go to the most centralized place, and unless this has something people are sorely missing, it might take a while to get this engine going.
Mocbuilder is another site doing more or less the same thing as this. So that makes three such sites coming up right now. Well I suppose such a situation was inevitable really
Bricklink has lots of MOC
My personal MOCs look silly compared to other builders, so I just post them in Instagram where all my non-Lego friends think my 5 year old did something really cool. :)
@magmafrost said:
"Mocbuilder is another site doing more or less the same thing as this. So that makes three such sites coming up right now. Well I suppose such a situation was inevitable really"
https://xkcd.com/927
@captcrouton said:
"My personal MOCs look silly compared to other builders, so I just post them in Instagram where all my non-Lego friends think my 5 year old did something really cool. :)"
You could also share on LEGO Life, so KFOLs will think the same!
As for me, I'm sticking to my personal website as well as Instagram and LEGO Life for now. I don't really wanna go around signing up for additional sites to publish my MOCs.
@galengidman said:
" @Brick_Master said:
"Can I use two fingers to zoom into a picture on mobile?...
Oh, no, this is disabled. Why do they all do this? "
Hi Brick_Master, Galen, owner/developer of Blockheads here. Zooming in on the images conflicts with the swipe left/right functionality. We're working on a better solution for image zooming. We had 3 different versions during our beta and none of them were right. But we know this is an area we can improve on and have plans to do so."
I missed your response when I posted my second comment. Thanks for replying, and I appreciate it's not easy to get everything perfect. But honestly, this is core functionality, when I look at a MOC picture the first thing I do is zoom to 100% to see the detail.
For this reason I don't really browse MOC photos on flickr either as their zoom is broken too, so it's not just you I'm having a go at :-)
Hope you can enhance the functionality because as I say it would be nice to see a good MOC site!
@Brick_Master said:
" @galengidman said:
" @Brick_Master said:
"Can I use two fingers to zoom into a picture on mobile?...
Oh, no, this is disabled. Why do they all do this? "
Hi Brick_Master, Galen, owner/developer of Blockheads here. Zooming in on the images conflicts with the swipe left/right functionality. We're working on a better solution for image zooming. We had 3 different versions during our beta and none of them were right. But we know this is an area we can improve on and have plans to do so."
I missed your response when I posted my second comment. Thanks for replying, and I appreciate it's not easy to get everything perfect. But honestly, this is core functionality, when I look at a MOC picture the first thing I do is zoom to 100% to see the detail.
For this reason I don't really browse MOC photos on flickr either as their zoom is broken too, so it's not just you I'm having a go at :-)
Hope you can enhance the functionality because as I say it would be nice to see a good MOC site!"
I'm curious to hear what zoom functionality is out there that you like? The folks I've talked to have suggested I mimic Flickr, but it looks like you prefer others.
Also, the infinite scroll issue you mentioned has been addressed. The popular page now paginates every 24 creations as intended.
how does this new site differ to Rebrickable?
@iriki said:
"Is is me or halfway through, the gallery is messed up? Using Firefox here"
This has been fixed. Thanks for letting me know!
@kkoster79 said:
"Um doesn't everyone use IG to share MOCs? Works the best."
I get a lot of Lego accounts in my Instagram recommended feed. TBH I don't think it's that great. For big builds, Flickr is better because you can upload super high resolution, lettings viewers zoom in on whatever details they want to see. Then there's story builds - Eurobricks (and MOCpages, RIP) is the best since you can have text in between pictures. I think Instagram is only the best for builds that only need a thumbnail photo. I guess you get way more exposure on Instagram, but I'm not personally building for the followers number.