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Tutorials ported over to the blog… my hand hurts

Tutorials ported over to the blog… my hand hurts

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You may be wondering why there was suddenly a flurry of tutorials posted on here, so I’m happy to report that I have finally finished porting over all my old tutorials to my blog format, fixed a couple errors and typos and have also created a tutorial summary page for a quick view of all my tutorials written by yours truly. You can check it on the complete tutorial list I created that gives a brief description of each tutorial and they are broken down into categories so that the list is a bit easier to follow. It’s actually kind of surprising to step back and see a complete list of everything I’ve written so far, which isn’t really all that much… but still, it’s about twice the amount of tutorials I thought I had under my belt.

Anyhow, some are a couple of years old and others are fairly new, so feel free to check em out and I look forward to creating some new ones this summer. For you Photoshop people that are grumbling about me using Corel Photopaint, remember that many of the principals are exactly the same, so you should be able to handle these tutorials in Photoshop without too many problems.

Now to go rest my aching hands from all that typing and image converting!

Dan

P2L gets a mention on PhotoshopTV!

P2L gets a mention on PhotoshopTV!

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Well how cool is this? The awesome folks at PhotoshopTV plugged Pixel2life.com at the end of their show in their latest broadcast! This was a total and completely awesome surprise and you can check it out online at http://www.photoshoptv.com/play

If you want to cut directly to the part where they mention P2L, skip to exactly 38:00 on the timeline and you’ll catch the plug.

Thanks a bunch PSTV, you guys rock!

Dan

Server Fun Throughout the P2L Network

Server Fun Throughout the P2L Network

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Hello everyone! I would like to extend my apologies to everyone for all the bumps and bruises you may have acquired during our server migration that we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. Basically the dedicated Dual Xeon box that hosts Pixel2life.com and the my other sites was starting to peak during peak traffic hours and slowing to a crawl. We also had some frontpage exposure on Digg (Both P2L and my blog had separate mentions) that brought the site down to it’s knees and eventually everything was non-functional.

To take action on this, it was decided that a second dedicated box was required to help lighten the load, so another dual Xeon box was brought in but then we ran into issues setting up a vlan for the two machines and that had to be scraped. ThePlanet did a bit of tap dancing and finally Ty and I got pretty fed up and we started applying some pressure for something that would work. Low and behold, ThePlanet was just about to introduce some seriously kick ass new hardware and as it turns out, some perfect gear for what I needed. They have some awesome new quad CPU boxes (Dual Core Dual Opterons) that would out perform the proposed solution of running 2 dual Xeon boxes, plus I would get to run 64-bit Apache!

So, the changes were made this weekend, but we had some stability issues while compiling and some other road blocks that led to a bit of downtime that led to several hundred emails to Jay and I. As of now, the server has been stable for about 32 hours, so it looks like we managed to get the wrinkles ironed out and all of P2L network sites are up and running. At this moment, images may seem to load a bit slow because Keepalive is off while we ensure everything else is running well, but we plan to re-enable it tonight.

That’s about it for server drama and hopefully we’ve cleared all the major hurdles until we need to upgrade again 😉

Dan

Tutorial List Updated and a General Update

Tutorial List Updated and a General Update

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Hello everyone!

Just wanted to drop a quick note and let you guys know that I have started to update other areas of the blog and I’ve been working on some new projects, including our Hammer Update, which I’m excited to say is back on track after some would-be delays decided to pop up for Jay and would have stalled development. It took a week, but it looks like the green light is back on.

I’ve updated the Complete Tutorial List area of the blog so you can easily see a compilation of all my original articles and tutorials for various subjects, and I can assure you that you will continue to see many more this summer.

Other than that, things have been going well and I look forward to hounding suppliers and corporations for prizes this year for our summer prize giveaway contests. Let the begging begin! If you or an organization you know would be interested in supplying us with donated product to be featured as prizes (You will get MEGA traffic exposure as a contest sponsor), give me a buzz and we can hammer out the details.

That’s it for now, see you next post!

Dan

General Update – S.E.E.D Released, Server Added and Other Goodies

General Update – S.E.E.D Released, Server Added and Other Goodies

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Hello everyone!

The last week or so has been quite busy for me and things don’t seem to be letting up in the foreseeable future, which of course is not a bad thing. For starters, the AvP style fanfilm by Pete Mander finally arrived in my studio in raw format last week for some Divx loving. You can check out this 30 minute fan made film at the official website at www.seedfilm.com. A huge congrats goes out to Pete Mander and his cast and crew at finally releasing this 2 year project!

The secondary server has finally been implemented for Pixel2life Studio owned websites to handle the extra traffic. During peak times, the server was starting to bog down a bit due to all the activity on Pixel2life.com. We’ve added a second dual CPU server to process HTTP and other services, and the main server will process MySQL queries only. This should sufficiently balance the load for us to allow for growth and handle huge spikes like Digg or other large portals generate from time to time. The new server has been installed for a couple of days now and appears to working with the other box perfectly. I’m keeping close eye on things over the next little bit to calm my nerves more than anything.

I’ve also been working on some new articles and managed to finally release my DMCA Law tutorial, which teaches webmasters how to take action when their website content has been stolen. I think this is a subject that is easily understood, yet so many don’t have the faintest clue of what’s involved when it comes to copyright infringement. I hope this will be a huge help to many people in the future.

The good folks over at Layers Magazine recently signed up for some advertising on our network ad system and sent me a few copies of their magazine, and let me tell you, this is a MUST HAVE for Photoshop and Adobe enthusiasts or professionals alike. So, a big thanks to them for the ad purchase and the magazines! Be sure to check them out at www.layersmagazine.com for information on subscribing and for a slew of online Adobe goodness.

I went out for dinner and some pool playage with Eric from Photoshopsupport.com a couple of Fridays ago and had a blast, despite losing 5 games to 7 in a display of complete and utter loss of skills. I’ll be scheduling a rematch in a couple of weeks. I emailed Alex, fellow Montrealer and webmaster of www.idigitalemotion.com, for some brewskis as well, but no word from his end of the city yet. If any of you fellow Montreal readers (Or visitors to the area) want to get together for some drinks to talk shop and share some laughs, drop me a line and we’ll make a date!

Last, but not least, Jay is having a hilarious contest to customize his version of our network logo on his Blog site. You can get the details at the Pixel2life Forums and see the current mascots in action on twod.co.uk.

That’s about it for now folks, be good and we’ll see you next update!

Dan