Art, Technology & People

Hello everyone!

My apologies for the lack of posts on the Journal lately, but it’s been quite busy here in the land of P2L with various projects in the works and some fun stuff happening in the community. First off, our first summer contest was announced a couple of weeks ago and it’s been a real hit, with TONS of entries! Canen Art is the host of our first ever photo contest, and they donated some awesome prizes, including a professionally mounted print for their studio. You can get all the details for this contest HERE. The contest closes at the end of the week, so hurry and get your submissions in ASAP!

Has a little “media mention” recently in the Sunday Start Ledger published June 25th that I am trying to get a copy of… if anyone can grab this for me and scan it, I’d really appreciate it. In the meantime, it was also on their online article on HERE.

Hammertime is still going as always, but has recently really started to take shape and it’s finally starting to look like a website of some sort! NGPixel and Chaos King have been working quite hard on this, and with final exams out of the way, we’ve been able to pick up the pace to finish up. I’m hoping to wrap up in a couple of weeks, but I can’t promise a final date as yet because there’s just too many loose ends that need to be tied up. Either way, it’ll looking great and I’m sure you guys are going to LOVE this project. Keep your eye on the main site news at Pixel2life for more updates on the release.

Aside from that, I am gearing up to get back into freelance projects once v3 is out, so if you have some large scale web projects you want to bring to life, you’ll be able to have the crew from P2L at your service in the non-too-distant future! More to come on our professional services later this summer.

That’s about it from my end… Hammertime and P2L maintenance is my life atm!

Take care!
Dan

It is my pleasure to announce our first ever Photography Competition, presented by Pixel2life Studios and Canen Art! Canen Art is the photography shop of our very own staff member Jason, who is a professional photographer specializing in breath taking scenery and wildlife photography. His site allows you to download quality wallpapers, stock shots and prints and is constantly being updated with his latest work, which never fails to impress.

Jason has been extremely generous and donated some sweet prizes for this contest, which of course will be photography oriented. Get all the details at the Contest Announcement post!

Good luck to everyone who enters!

Dan

OK folks, it’s time to tell us what you like and/or what you don’t like about P2L, and what you think we’re missing and should be added. This can be anything and everything, ranging from how the tutorial search works to how the forum is run and moderated. Feel free to suggest new features or categories you think we should carry, whether you think we need more or less graphics etc… anything and everything is welcomed and it can be good or bad.

I would really appreciate your honesty here folks, so please send me whatever you got, even if it’s negative. If you wish your identity to remain anonymous, simply use the contact form at http://www.pixel2life.com/contact/ and select the applicable topic and use bogus information for the name and return email. Just remember if you use a bogus email, I won’t be able to contact you back. Otherwise, you can PM or email me directly at info (at symbol) pixel2life dot com.

Thanks in advance!
Dan

Well this has been a rather crazy and somewhat messy weekend in the world of P2L. Unfortunately my prediction from months ago that Jay’s college project my-tuts.com would eventually overcome P2L in terms of his interest and priority has come true and Jay has left P2L along with several staff members that will be joining him on his project. One of our original admins, Jaymz, as well as Stu and Adam have all retired from P2L staff to work on my-tuts.com with Jay.

There’s some drama in between all that, but it’s really a moot point and not worth dwelling on, and I wish Jay and his staff the best of luck on his new project. We all have lives to lead and decisions to make in life, so I will assume Jay is doing what’s best for him. These guys were all fantastic people to have on the P2L team and they all made massive contributions to the site and I will always appreciate that. Too bad it had to end, and they will be missed… Jay has been one of my best friends for the last couple years.

So, with that said, this has somewhat put the hammertime release on the kibosh. Luckily, the community stepped forward when they saw Jay leave and several qualified PHP programmers have now jumped into the fray with me and we hope to recover from where Jay left off on hammertime and still release it with all the kick ass goodness we had originally planned, and maybe even some extra goodies! The project is still very much behind though… in fact, it doesn’t even have a working front end yet, so the new Dev folks have pretty much an entire project to complete at this point. If you’re wondering who these guys are, I will have the honor and pleasure to introduce the team when we release the project to the public. We’re going to aim for a July 1st release, but this is more of an internal target and by no means an official release date… in fact, this time-line won’t even be announced on the P2L, so consider that an inside scoop! Who knows… we may even pull a bunny out of our hat and get the thing launched even earlier.

The twodded section of P2L is also a mess, and obviously with Jay gone, the twodded staff are a bit scattered now. Jay said that twodded was more or less dead and that he would resurrect it with his new project, so we’ll see what happens. A few twodded staffers have already announced they will no longer be writing new tutorials, but they will still be on the forums to help answer questions and chat with the rest of the community, which is awesome. These guys are very talented… So, I’m slowly sorting out that situation as we move along and figure out what’s what on the site.

So that’s about it from my end… basically I am working very hard to get the new Dev folks up to speed on everything as best I can and looking forward to the hammertime release and our summer series of contests. Hopefully I can get back to writing tutorials and articles in the coming months.

Take care everyone and I’ll be posting more scoops soon!

Dan