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Month: August 2006

Great Web 2.0 Article and the Silly Trends Involved

Great Web 2.0 Article and the Silly Trends Involved

There’s a lot of good from the Web 2.0 movement, but also some pretty silly trends, especially “Beta” sites. That has to be the sorriest and laziest way to explain releasing a bug infested website I have ever seen. If your website has bugs when you release, it’s because you didn’t test it properly, end of story. When we released the latest upgrade of the P2L website, it had bugs. It was our goof, our screw-up and our issue. We took responsibility for the issues and fixed them and that was that… well now webmasters can explain those bugs away just by adding a Beta tag to their site logo! It’s basically a slight step up from having fancy “under construction” logos all over the place.

Anyhow, check out this hilarious article at terminally-incoherent.com.

Dan

Create 3D Style Text with a Wireframe Effect in Corel Photopaint

Create 3D Style Text with a Wireframe Effect in Corel Photopaint

You may recall that a couple of months ago, I posted a fairly simple tutorial on how to create pseudo 3D text in Corel Photopaint, which was an easy effect to create, and could achieve a fairly high degree of realism in terms of lighting and shadows. Well today I would like to take that tutorial one step further and create a similar effect, but show you how to add a lined wire-frame to the text for that added 3D punch. This looks great on squared text types, but with the right kind of tweaking, you could pull this off with anything. In fact, the final effect almost resembles pixel art:

user posted image

We’ll also work in some sexy gradients to spice up the lighting and all that good stuff too! I’ve included lots of screenshots because this can be a bit confusing due to the multiple objects we’ll be piling on at times. So roll up your sleeves and let’s get to it!

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v3, Bowling, Rumors, Stress and Lessons Learned

v3, Bowling, Rumors, Stress and Lessons Learned

Man, where do I start?

It has been a VERY stressing week since the last time I posted, and it really hasn’t died down very much. I’ve been REALLY bothered by the negative feedback I’ve received on the new layout at Pixel2life, but those with some experience with large sites getting revamped have told me it’s completely natural and something akin to growing pains. I’ve obviously received more positive feedback than negative, but I can’t help but agree that I’m slowly losing my fondness for the new layout. This was a design that was heavily influenced from beyond my personal tastes, and I think I regret it. NG is now working on creating an updated version of the old version 2 layout to suit the new features found within v3, and we’ll be releasing sometime before the end of the weekend if all goes well. I know this is a pain in the ass for everyone, but that and the fact that ad conversion is HORRIBLE on this new version forces the decision.

Either way, I’m sure people will like this layout and will get used to it very quickly. We’ve wasted a lot of time with this layout juggling, but hopefully this will be the last of it for the next couple of years. I seriously think I will hand any future version design and implementation to a design company if I can afford it… I’m just not equipped for all this stress lol!

Anyhow, I’ve been really kind of focused and obsessed on all this lately and it’s been taking over my life in the last couple of weeks… I haven’t been sleeping well, my daughter was mad at me etc… so it was time to get things back into perspective and start enjoying myself a bit again. So, today I took my little girl out for her first try at bowling! I wasn’t so sure she was strong enough yet, but low and behold, she manages to get the ball pushed down the lane hard enough to knock over at least a few pins at the front. The shrieks of delight when those 2 or 3 pins fell over made it all worth it… she was having the time of her life and would come running over for a hug each time she threw the ball down the lane (I taught her the granny style shot).

Here’s a pic of the two pro bowlers after 3 sets of frames:

Bowling Champs!

It was just great to go out and get my mind off of things.

In other news, it’s really sad to see people circulating rumors and completely ridiculous stories about the old programmer and my friend Jay from P2L who now runs my-tuts. Today I spoke to someone that had so many strange ideas, I’m surprised he didn’t reveal that I eat babies or something. Guys, if you’re going to build up this opinion of myself or Jay before you’ve even so much as had a single conversation with us, confirm your stories and facts with us before you start shit throwing in the community. It’s EXTREMELY obvious that a few people have this stupid need to try and fuel a non-existent feud between Jay and I, and it’s too bad because despite Jay and I moving on with our respective projects, these drama whores just can’t. Get over it for God’s sakes. Jay and I do send each other emails and will probably always stay in touch to a certain degree… I know that sucks for the schoolyard kids that wanted a fight in the alley, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Anyhow, it’s 2AM and I need some sleep… I’ve been alone with Corina for a few days so it’s been long nights working on P2L and early mornings being with my daughter. I’ve actually become quite proficient in snoozing on the couch while she sits next to me holding my hand and watching Barney or Caillou.

Good night and talk to you all soon!

Dan

Pixel2life awarding 6 months of ad space for a winning logo for their site!

Pixel2life awarding 6 months of ad space for a winning logo for their site!

After a lot of debating and indecision, we’ve decided to let our users take a crack at coming up with a logo that looks better than the current “Bowl of Pixels” logo. The winner gets a 6 month Partner Ad spot, which normally sells for $750. This is a chance for the “bowl” haters to show us something better.

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Pixel2life Upgrade (aka Hammertime) was bumpy, but a huge hit!

Pixel2life Upgrade (aka Hammertime) was bumpy, but a huge hit!

Well, things are just starting to settle down now in terms of the insane amount of emails, PMs and IMs I’ve received from people all over the world offering their congratulations, comments and well wishes. Sprinkle in the always-expected hate mail, and it was a blast!

Last night was just nuts, and to top it off, just as we’re about to launch, NG and I both lose power (we both live in the same city)! Mine was just a flicker that shut me down for a second, but NG stayed gone. We waited a bit and eventually decided to launch at 10PM. NG joined us JUST as we opened up the site and within 2 minutes, the flood of 1800 people at once killed the machine and crashed the whole thing lol! So we eventually regained control and locked things down to figure out what was happening… Serverseed hopped on and we tweaked things until we got a handle on the situation, and we’re continuing to tweak the caching system for optimum performance.

We’re also going to start going through the bug reports, suggestions and just the massive work list we all have to plow through and get done. There’s lots to do, but so far it’s turned out quite well all things considered and I’m pretty happy about it.

So thanks again to everyone for your encouragement and I’m really happy that so many people dig the new site. Now I have to get my ass back to work!

Dan