A little general round up

Well its been a long long while, and I thought I’d update you guys that do still visit this site regularly on what’s happening, why this site isn’t being updated so much and what is actually going to be coming up in the near future. (Prepare for a very long entry)

Twod/Twodded has had the ladybug since it was introduced by Dan in Twod v2, and because of that - the bug has almost been the “Jamie Huskisson watermark” on all sites I do too. Every now and again it’s also necessary to bring things update and on the right, you can see a very small preview of what is to come from the new update of the bug mascot. The new version has been whipped up by Richard Shilling, a very talented flash vector artist whose DeviantArt page you can view here. Now, will you see me continue my work learning action script/flash through creating games involving this mascot? We’ll see…

*Start rant* A second thing I have to address is the amount of rips going around, and the serious lack of creativity I’m seeing from a lot of people lately. This isn’t aimed at the tutorial community, but the tutorial listing community or almost even the “rippers community”. We at Pixel2life are seeing a new tutorial listing almost everyday since the launch of our v2 site, and every one of them are exactly the same. 98% of these tutorial listings are started for money purposes, to get the user some money, and the rest are started purely for traffic reasons. Honestly guys, your just ruining it for the learners, if they have to go to a listing that basically accepts anything that’s submitted (because you have to whore out the love). Then clearly you should just shut down your listings and let people who have a passion about the subject guide users in the right direction. Just a short note for the people claiming to accept “nothing but quality tutorials”, try reading a few that you’ve accepted. *End rant*

On the slowness of updates side of things: I have 2-3 client jobs, a big Pixel2life related site/feature (coming soon), Pixel2life and Twodded CSS’ing and finally, 4 big assignments (that I’m actually pretty excited about working on) for college. This is also along with negotiating several layouts for Twodded projects and preparing the absolutely massive list of features for future versions of both Twodded and Pixel2life. So please do try to excuse me if I’m too busy to post on here, but I do love you guys, and the feedback from you is absolutely everything - so if you don’t like something, let me know why and I’ll look at it!

On the Twodded side of things, we recently changed the way we are dealing with our Twodded trialers. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the old Twodded trialing process I’ll go through it:

• User submits application
• User waits around 1-2 weeks for a reply from me
• User gets accepted/rejected
• User gets 2 weeks to post up a tutorial to support their application
• People bully the user into bettering their tutorial (Nicely of course)
• User gets a secret staff discussion about them and a herd of sheep decide their fate
• User gets accepted/rejected

Now, with this new trailing process it’s much more focused on the tutorials and your creativity. In the past I would literally have to suggest tens of tutorials to some people applying because they couldn’t come up with anything! The new trialing system is as follows:

• User posts up tutorial in the Twodded trial tutorials forum
• People bully the user into bettering their tutorial (Yes - still nicely)
• User gets a public vote for the public to decide whether they want the person to write for Twodded or not
• A very small staff discussion on the user’s tutorial (No sheep…)
• User gets accepted/rejected

This new process takes roughly a week, at most two, and so far we have accepted two people onto the team, and have had roughly 6-7 applicants for Twodded that have actually posted up tutorials. Before we took over 100 applications and probably saw 5 tutorials from these applicants in the 2-3 months we had the previous method implemented.

On another note in relation to Twodded, I’ve been receiving a lot of e-mails thanking me for starting a site that really does deliver when promoting quality tutorials. A lot of people that e-mail and contact me are fed up of the massive amount of sites that simply write those “1-20 liner” tutorials and want it to learn something properly, and I’d like to think Twodded delivers with this. I’d like to thank everyone who sends me these e-mails, as it really does make it worth while to create a site such as Twodded and have people say “it’s about time someone created something this good”. We are listening to your suggestions for Twodded and we’ve re-organised the menu on the site and have a few changes in the next Twodded version that’ll help you get your tutorial easier and the tutorial layout will hopefully be a lot clearer and sexier to look at - this is just the first stage of our re-building of Twodded to fit the needs of the users :)

On a pretty great note, you should be seeing the funnypicgenerator come back online within the next 6 months.. I’m saying 6 months as well, you’ll see. But this is guaranteed to be the best funny pic site you’ll ever see, as its not focused purely on “oh, here are my pics”, it says to you “here are my pics, why not share them?” and offers you various ways of doing so. I’m happy with my list of ideas for it and hopefully you will be too.

On a small note also, PEGZ won the team templating competition it was entered for. I’d like to think because of the comedy.. as we where a pretty funny team, but I’m pretty sure it was by default as no-one else did all the very small things such as Invoice template etc. to go with the created template. So to leave you with some words of wisdom…

“Default! Default! The two best words in the English language!”
- Homer Simpson

"For every person who subscribes to my feed, a ninja will climb a tree and stay there until the fire department tells him to get down."

Just stripped my ecademy notification settings and most of the profile. Absolutely sick and tired of hearing from them.