Art, Technology & People

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you guys know that we've made some changes to the forum format on the site. The first thing I did was remove the Community Buzz forum and I have merged everything with the site news area. So now when we announce things like contests on other community sites, new places to check out etc… it will be done as part of the site news updates. It makes more sense to have general news posts about the site and the community all in the same area instead of scattered over various forums. There are also many other areas on the forums to get community related news and for you guys to post your announcements too.

The second thing we removed is the articles area, which was really supposed to be a forum where P2L staff would post their articles, which has been rendered null by the upcoming publishing system. We will continue to post handy articles that we find, but we will post them in the relevant help areas on the forums instead of in one giant dumping ground. All the old articles have been moved to the General Webdesign Help area seeing as most of the articles touched base on webmaster related content. You can also check staff sigs for links to their respective blogs where we post articles and content… in my case I post tech related items, articles and sneak peeks at upcoming P2L goodies.

So that's it for now… Now to go back to bugging NG about the Publishing System!

Dan

God bless geeks with a sense of humor.

On behalf of Pixel2life staff, I would like to congratulate one of our members on his outstanding achievement of releasing his first professionally published book! A big shoutout to Tiago Dias (aka FunkySoul) who has just released From After Effects to Flash – Poetry in Motion Graphics.

Book Description:

As a Flash 8 designer, you have discovered the power of the video tools in the application. The new filters and effects and ActionScript classes allow you to create a variety of stunning visual effects in Flash. What you probably haven’t discovered is how easy it is empower your video hundreds of times more by combining the many effects and tools in After Effects 7 Professional with Flash!

This book, the first to explore the potential power and creativity boost that can be unleashed when After Effects and Flash are used together, is designed to get you up to speed with working in these two applications while hitting you with some creative innovation. You will discover how effectively you can use After Effects to create video and animation effects that were either extremely difficult or impossible to achieve in Flash.

By the end of this book, you will have created a variety of projects ranging from text effects, masks, and alpha channel video to 3D effects and audio visualization. All are designed to show you the potential available to you with these two powerhouse applications, and, more importantly, to expand the arsenal of creative motion graphics tools at your disposal.

Who is Tiago?

Tiago Dias, who was an original Twodded tutorial writer and is an active Adobe Community Expert is also a P2L Premium Publisher and is currently among the group of beta testers helping us tweak the upcoming Tutorial Publishing System. His streaming Flash MP3 XML tutorial is among one of the most highly recommended tutorials on P2L and his other online publishings are nothing but truly professional. He is also active on our support forums helping many of our fellow members with follow ups on his tutorials and general questions on Flash, After Effects, and anything else Adobe related. He’s truly a class act and I can’t thank him enough for his constant contributions to this site and the community. We wish him all the success in the world, he definitely deserves it!

His new book can be purchased at the following online shops:

– Amazon US
– CompMan UK
– Springer US
– Barnes and Noble
– Bookpool US

You can also order this book through local shops using ISBN 1590597486.

Congrats Tiago! We all hope you rake in the BLING!

Dan

As I continue to work on my Unix skills (Never thought I’d see the day) I thought I’d share some of the quick little tricks I am learning as I go. To manually restart cPanel services from SSH, simply type the following at prompt:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/cpanel restart

Hit [enter] and you’ll see a series of OK messages pop up as the various cPanel services restart and come back online… it only takes a couple of seconds under normal circumstances.

After a lot of sweating and swearing, we’ve had time to track our stats for the last couple of days since our coding and server tweaks and updates, and the numbers are pretty clear:

You can see the highest peak is lunchtime (12PM – 2PM approx) Nov-11 and that was more or less the reflection of the high loads we were getting on the box. Later that night, you can see it dropped when we began the initial tweaks to the Apache configuration and we added additional caching to the site. As you can see on the 12th to 15th, load was still high, but it was already better. You can see the 9 hours of downtime when the load was pretty much dead from the eAccelerator pooch job. Then on the night of the 15th we did additional tweaks to the search system and upgraded Apache and PHP and the scores dropped again by a huge margin. You can see the peaks for the 16th and 17th are much lower than previous days.

Below the chart you can see the current load averages, which are right on the money with our target goal.

So congrats to Elvio, Nick and Jamie on a job well done!