Moving sales!

Since I’m moving I’d like to ship out some finished and unfinished kits so that I don’t have to keep so many

For the finished kits at:

http://codyscoop.com/forsale

I’m willing to negotiate discounts of 10-40% if purchasing multiple kits…

I’ll also be selling several lots of unbuilt kit later, stay tuned…

Is this things still on?

Yes it’s still on! But with all the traveling and some life changes modeling has taken a back seat. This is not to say I haven’t done anything all this while, but when you’re not inspired you’re not inspired

I however find enough patience to repaint this incredibly awesome Knight of Skeleton statue that I bought – it’s insanely expensive (shipping is like $100) and I’ll probably never buy something like this again, but I just couldn’t resist the awesomeness of it. The prepaint job is not the best to put it moderately, putting very dull silver on the knight’s armor is just wasting the statue – the dude needs serious Alcladilization! Moreover the dark parts on the statue has no variations in ton – the drybrushing work wasn’t very good on it. Anyway I’m about half way through repainting the dude, will post pics when I’m done.

Oops

Apparently I messed up some templates and the gallery pics weren’t displaying… fixed.

Boy do I feel stupid…

Thanks for all of you guys who helped me test the new server! Unfortunately after a lot of running around and a day-long down time, it seems I’m not ready to move away yet. After wasting a lot of time, I’m still back to where I was Ah well… I also lost the testing thread since I didn’t back it up, grrrr.

Sigh

The new gallery is down again. Apparently someone was hammering it, and the server couldn’t take the load. I guess I’ll try writing a simple one myself…

In the mean time I’ve resurrected all the old galleries.

New gallery test

There are still more work to be done on my new Gallery2-driven gallery, but I think I should test things out first… say if the host still can’t handle the load, I should really switch before the 30-day trial period. So I’m giving it a one-day test drive I don’t have time to put everybody in yet, plus I want to reshoot some kits that I think are worth the trouble. But there are already quite a few new reshot kits (like 3/4 of the Oni Coach girls).
It’s really funny that I work at a place where our resources are constrained the least by computer cpu cycles. So I naturally didn’t think it’d be the problem with my hosting service. But now I read that many of these companies use Pentium 2 servers, which explains a lot…

Now with sauce

Wordpress has this Gravatar (globally recognized avatars) support, and I really like this feature so much that I’ve tossed it in. Then I realized I haven’t enabled registration on the site Yikes, got that fixed finally…

Thanks to Masa’s suggestion I’m converting the gallery to a more accessible format, with some tradeoffs. But it should be easier to navigate and easier for me to put new data in. It was really not an easy decision – you have two softwares – a mini content management/blog software, and a gallery. Each have their own hierarchy of data (pages and subpages for blog, albums and subalbums for gallery), so how do you combine the two, and which software would be the one driving the navigation? In the end it seems to make more sense to work inside a gallery — you want to navigate from pictures to pictures, with a little bit of textual information tossed in, rather than navigating to and from text/pictures all the time like the way I have it right now, which is not as good an experience. I didn’t really thought about this in the past.

Anyway back to working on the horse…

Back :(

The hosting company took the site off yesteday and today, as they claimed that I was using too much cpu. I think there were spiders going through the gallery that I was still working on optimizing. Unfortunately the hosting people use some bizarro math as criteria for reinstatatement that will put me out for at least a day. Then today I got no response from them for most of the day which made me quite angry.
Anyway I’m glad that this sucky experience is over for now.

Forum

All the old blogs and threads can now be found in the new forum.

Good thing I converted the phpBB forum and all the data to use the SMF software before I moved hosting. For some reasons the phpBB forum didn’t want to be recovered But SMF is better in many ways (which is why I switched). Originally I planned to migrate all data to Wordpress, but the SQL tables behind the two softwares are very different, so it looks like it’ll be a lot of work that I’d rather not do at this point.

Gallery2 Integration & H kits

I guess I haven’t done any leisure hacking for so long that I found working on my site really appealing

I’ve gotten much further along with embedding Gallery2. A week ago I couldn’t decide whether I wanna go with Coppermine or Gallery2. The main objection to Gallery2 was the lack of an open comment system; but then I thought may be I can integrate the Wordpress comment system into Gallery2! What a messy concept… but I decided to go with it.

The idea is I’d associate an album to a WP page. I doubt I really want a per-image commenting ability of coppermine, in particular I want all the comments to be grouped in one place (ok so I don’t really get a whole lot of comments, but I am not one to be deterred by such details ) . I chose Gallery2 over Coppermine mainly because it has an extremely nice array of methods to upload & construct galleries. I can even create the galleries on my PC and then upload them in the right hierarchy to my server with the Gallery Remote application! This beats uploading via ftp and then use the web interface to create new albums ala Coppermine.

Anyway, it went ok with the WPG2 plugin integration, which was a breeze. But the main stumbling block was the commenting system – I simply have no way of associating a WP page ID with an album. The Gallery2 API didn’t expose the details of an album, so I can’t associate a WP ID to it. Anyway after a few hours of crash and burn I found a way using mod rewrite to do its job… phew. So may be now I’ll start reconstructing my gallery – this time with a real interface

The first kit I’ll upload however is a 3-figure H diorama that I finished before I went on hacking. I haven’t done any H kits for so long, I’m fixing that with a full dosage For that, I also implemented some sort of adult check thingy. Coming soon!