Tag: paperdemon

Animating and Coding

Posted on by BogusRed

This past weekend was spent animating. I have almost an entire scene from our new anime spoof show fully animated. It still needs some revisions but it is close to final. However, there are still 13 other scenes to the episode… oh wait.. and we just added a couple more to the episode… well at least its coming along! I’m excited about it.

It’s getting me thinking about Surviving Together and I’m starting to think that perhaps I really am ready to take it on. But can I really handle working on both the new anime show AND Surviving Together? Perhaps I would be MORE productive if I worked on multiple projects because I’d enjoy flip flopping. I’m not sure what I want to do about the animation style for it though. I am thinking about possibly doing it in the same style as the new anime spoof show which is flash like. It’s faster to do and easier. But I feel like it may be too stiff. We’ll see.

I’m also getting the inkling to revising some old decrepid code on PD. I haven’t done much yet this year with programming but I think the first thing I want to tackle is this horrible polling system I wrote back in the day. I want to change it to CSS Div layout instead of tables and have it as a feature for groups and premium accounts. The poll can blend with the users profile skin too 😀 It wouldn’t take much work to get this thing updated and in better shape. I could have it ready for betas to test within a few days probably. I’m looking forward to working on it.

I also want to tackle rewriting the code for handling member accounts. It’s all a big mess. It’s like the oldest code on PD and its messy and hard to read. And I want to make it more exportable so I can use it on other projects. It’s just plain poorly written. Gah…

I’m tired. I had a very unproductive evening. I was chatting with a friend the whole night about various web development stuff and though it was neat and interesting to talk about all those different things, if at the end of the day I can’t see any sort of sign of having completed something or making progress on something, I sort of go to bed feeling a little depressed. I kind of want to stay up late and work on something just to feel better. But it’s 1am here and I have to get up for work at 8:45ish.

…

I think I’ll decide to sleep. :sleep: This forum post is my last 20 minutes of my day to make an effort at something constructive…. some how I don’t feel that much better…but tomorrow is a new day!

 

Lots of new members here!

Posted on by BogusRed

Over the past week we’ve had a lot of new sign ups on PaperDemon lately thanks to several prominent artists on DeviantArt. A lot of members there are getting frustrated with the rules and the moderator staff. Many people have posted on their journal entries that they are moving to PD or at least trying it out. It’s unfortunate to see things being handled so poorly over there at DA but at the same time I’m glad people are coming here to check us out.

The boom in sign ups has been significant. On average, we usually get around 1.5 sign ups a day. On Friday of last week we had over 100 sign ups. Since then we’ve had around 20 – 50 sign ups per day. I’ve been very busy helping out the moderating staff with the influx of submissions and its been quite difficult handling it all. I haven’t had any time for development for the past week.

I’ve also had a lot of interest from people in signing up for premium accounts. I’m sorry that they aren’t ready for purchase yet but I’ll push that up my priority list. Hopefully I’ll have more time after things cool down a little to work on finishing up the features.

I’m so happy things are so busy here though. It’s great to see our little community flourishing.

 

I’m a college graduate!

Posted on by BogusRed

Well, I finally did it. I completed the BFA Illustration program at San Jose State. I’m so happy to finally be done with school.

Reflecting back on my time in college, I often beat myself up inside for spending so much time on the computer working on PaperDemon.com rather than on my art homework. Had I been more dedicated to art, I think I could have become one of the top artists in the class. But my heart was elsewhere, with web development and design. But now I think it was actually a good thing I spent so much time on PaperDemon. Had I not been spending my time there, I would not have gotten the experience and skills necessary to work at Google.

A couple years ago I had a feeling I might go in the web dev direction but I kept telling myself that if I did go that route it would be like I was selling out. Like I gave up art and took the easier route. I know pursuing the illustration direction would have been much harder for me but I no longer feel like I gave up. I feel more like my animation projects are something I can work on in my spare time, rather than doing it as a career. But who knows where I’ll end up in the future.

So what am I going to do to celebrate my graduation? I’m going to Disneyland!

One thing that’s been a bit depressing lately is the traffic flow to PaperDemon. At about this time last year, PD was receiving roughly 30,000 unique hits a month. Now it’s HALF that! A few friends suggested the decline in traffic was due to the fact that no new episodes have been released for Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater lately. So with that in mind, I’ve decided that I’ll get the next episode done by the end of next week.

Since my last blog post, I have released the new site design for PaperDemon.com. It has been well received. I think I probably put more time into this site design than into previous designs for PD. Another big change was that I changed the format from a fixed width of 770 pixels to a liquid/adjustable layout. This makes browsing much more enjoyable for those with wider monitors, while still being usable for those with 800×600 resolution monitors.

Now that I’m done with school, I can focus more on my personal projects. I’ll probably flip back and forth between animation projects and PD.

 

Spring Break recap

Posted on by BogusRed

I did work on my vis dev work but not as much as I should have.

I didn’t touch my short film or Surviving Together.

I did work a lot on Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater. We released two episodes and have recorded three more that are ready for animating. I will work on these slowly though the semester.

But mostly what I spent my time on was PaperDemon.com. I decided that it was time to build all of those nifty features that I’ve had in mind for PD and prepare to sell Premium Accounts. I still have some more work to do but Premium Memberships will be offered some time in mid to late February. I’ve spent a ton of time on it and I can’t wait to offer the Premium Memberships and see what people do with the cool new features. I don’t want to get into the details of the features because they are already explained on PD.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it is I want to do in life and what it is I enjoy doing. I spend an awful lot of time on my website and it makes sense to me that web design or web programming is where my future is. Even though I don’t have hardly any formal education or training in it, I have a lot of knowledge and experience on the subject. I really enjoy organizing information and designing an interface to display that information, which is exactly what the Paper Demon website is all about. People upload their artwork and writing and it is categorized and organized into sections. Then that information is displayed for the viewer. I don’t know why but I really enjoy doing it and for the past month I’ve been working at least 40 hours a week developing new features for PD. I often work late in the night until I can hardly think strait or keep my eyes open. And then I just collapse on my bed and sleep. So that’s what I want to do.

My Mom sent me a link to an article on Monster.com recently that was really encouraging:

http://technology.monster.com/articles/webdesigner/

It says in there that your ticket to getting into the field is to build something. Haha! I have PaperDemon.com as well as a few other websites. It’s encouraging to know that the hardest step is already done! I do think I need to spend some time improving the user interface of PD though. I know that some of it is a little plain and confusing so I’ll need to get a book on UI design principles and look at other websites for ideas.

 

The First Of Many

Posted on by BogusRed

This is my first blog entry here at my personal website BogusRed.net.

Since the Paper Demon community moved to another domain name, I figured I’d use BogusRed.net for my own personal space on the web. Once I get everything up and running, you’ll find my sketches and fanart as well as my music. In the meantime, you can view much of my artwork at Paper Demon.

Well, just yesterday my boyfriend bought me a new hard drive for my upcoming birthday on Sept. 8th. It’s 200GBs woo hoo! My old drive was only 80 and it was getting pretty full. So full that it slowed down my computer’s performance. Now I can use that extra 80GB hard drive for backups :D.

 Just this passed weekend I moved over the Paper Demon site to its new domain name and server space at micfo.com hosting. I’ve never tried this host before but I heard from a friend it was good and they gave me a free month trial! I’ve only had minor setup problems so far and I’ve found the tech support to be extremely fast, unlike my last host Apollohosting.com. That’s one of the major reasons I decided to switch. I have a whole list of reasons why I switched which you can read about in the Paper Demon News Post on the site move.

Hopefully I’ll get the art and music sections up within the next few weeks.