Twev1701.net

Just so everyone doesn’t think I’m blowing smoke up their respective asses, here’s proof that I’m working on the new site! Here I am, well, there I was about 5 minutes ago, sitting in my computer room, glass of Pepsi Blue in hand, working on the new site. It looks like I’m off 4 out of the next 5 days, so I’m hoping to have the new site up by Sunday. The main page is coming closer to a reality and the rest of the site is simplly a matter of scripting. Well, enough jabberin’ for me. Back to work!

A new week means a new wallpaper. I’d hoped to have the new wallpaper section online by now but I just can find the right archive script yet. All the images are upload and waiting, I just need to find the right script to put them in order and serve them to you on a highly polished silicon platter.

The new site is progressing well. Design for me is one of the hardest stages because it’s so intergral to your whole site. You want to have enough room for everything you have now, but sitll leave room for fufture upgrades. On the other side of the coin, you don’t want your site to be too bare so that it looks like it’s begging for content. You have to find that happy medium, and then format it all together in a nice 750 pixels across enviroment.

But without further ado….

Elizabeth Hurley

Even though the new site won’t be up for a bit, that doesn’t mean I should deprive you fine people of your weekly wallpaper! Enjoy!

Sandra Bullock

JP and I got some new toys the other day. In getting things together to make our web comic, we quickly realized that inking them in PhotoShop is great, but really sucks with a mouse. One of my ex-girlfriends had a nice Wacom pen tablet, and I used it a few times for some rotoscoping. However, the pen tablet only had a 4in x 5in work area. Not very big at all. So we did some research online and found that that nice little pen tablet was $99. The larger tablets we were looking at were bordering on obscene at $700+. Then I happened to come across a nice little company called Aiptek. They make a nice 12in x 9in pen tablet for the oh-so-nice price of $149. SOLD! However, we had to wait for shipping. Well…the one thing you should know about us is that we hate to wait. So, doing a search we found that CompUSA carries them. However, the nearest CompUSA is a little over 2 hours away in New Jersey. (we’re from northeast Pennsylvania) So, taking the bull by the horns we jumped in the car the next morning and off to Jersey we went. Nearly getting lost long the way, we finally arrived and purchased 2 of them. After using it now for a day or two, and having previous experience with the Wacom tablet, I’d have to say that for the non-professional, the Aiptek Hyper Pen 12000U is a great value. I would seriously recommend it to anyone who wants a pen tablet with a rather gracious work area – the same size of normal printer paper – and a gracious price to match. Here are 2 pictures of the nice tablet.

JP testing out his tablet, seeing how well it inks on of our web comic characters in PhtotoShop

My tablet at home. You can see just how big of a tablet it is by comparing to my keyboard and mouse

After about 2 weeks of being down, the site is back! The upgrade that I ordered for the site went well, but then I had some serious DNS problems for the past week. All in all it was a total pain in the ass, but something that I’m glad I did. In truth it wasn’t all bad, but a ton of miscommunication not only slowed things down but got me really pissed off in the process. But all seems to be well now. I now have MySQL, PHP, password protection, and sub-domains. That may now mean anything to you guys, but to me that means that once the new site is done, a lot of it will be automated, allowing me to not only post more stuff, but more frequently.

Ah, thought your eyes were tricking you, didn’t you? Yes, I am re-designing the site again. It’s not so much that I didn’t like the old site, but with the new upgrade, I really want to streamline the site and it’ll just be too much work to re-vamp the old design, so a new design and structure will be easiest. Trust me. I really don’t have a time table on the new site, but look for it sometime within the next 2 weeks or so. I have a lot of other things going on, including a new Web-Comic I’ve started with JP, along with a new content site we’ve started. Although the Web-Comic is coming along nicely, our new site is a different story. We just can’t seem to narrow down a solid idea for content. If you have any good ideas, drop me a line and let me know.

Well, time to get back to work. Just wanted to make a quick post to keep everyone updated.