And as you can see, the design has been changed over as well now. It turned out quite well, I think.

You may not realize it, but you are looking at an almost complete re-write of this site. Aside from the main page and the template, quite literally all of the back end has been replaced.

When Awesomenessinabox.com was first launched (back then it was CaerPlatypus.com), I was operating on a very limited time budget. The site was part of a portfolio package I was putting together for Nanaonsha ltd. in hopes of obtaining employment with them. At the time I weighed the option of researching and choosing a CM system against just hacking some tables together quickly in a database, and as I had no idea how much time was involved in the former I ended up just slopping some simple tables into a database and populating them manually with data. This got the job done, but it was incredibly ugly from a maintenance point of view and had no support whatsoever for keeping a running blog. Every image I uploaded to a gallery required me to create a thumbnail myself and upload the image and it’s thumbnail into specific folders on my server via ftp. After doing so, I had to get a connection to my database and add a row to the appropriate table with a primary key that matched the filename of the image and thumbnail exactly.

Later, after deciding on WordPress as my CM system of choice for this site, I simply hacked the existing site into my WordPress install in an arrangement that would terrify even Mary Shelly. All of the existing pages were grafted into a custom template and left exactly as they were. Needless to say, while it didn’t take much time it didn’t alleviate any of the existing maintenance problems either.

And so I’ve been spending a little time over the past few weeks working on getting the site in order. All of my custom code on the backend has been removed in favor of the NextGen Gallery and Contact Form II plugins, and a few WordPress pages. I can now upload images to any gallery and add them to a blog post automatically, which is a huge time saver. Because of this, you should start seeing more work from my sketchbook from now on.

Part two of “Making the change” should appear in the next few days. Now that the backend has been switched over I’m going to finish the new frontend. The current visual design of the site, while not terrible, is rather too gray and bleak for my tastes.

I can’t believe TIGSource just did this. I remember people talking about the proper way to pronounce TIGSource in a comments thread the other day and somebody mentioned they thought it looked like “Tigersauce”. Hilarity ensued.

But then this: The Independent Gaming Souce

I’ve heard it said that a true artisan never blames his tools for his shortcomings. I say that better tools let you get more work done faster and with less aggravation, and in that vein I can only say FINALLY to the release of Gimp 2.4.

A quick qualifier here. I am not a Photoshop hater. I’m just cheap. Moving on…

Gimp has finally fixed my largest beef with the software, and a cause of much consternation with my image editing, especially digital paintings. Previously, when zooming your canvas in and out, the Gimp would simply do a point sample on the image, causing all kinds of chunky artifacts and making it extremely difficult to do anything with a canvas scaled below 50%. No more. The new Gimp finally scales canvases smoothly when zoomed, something that I wish would have been implemented a long time ago.

Besides the ability to see your canvas at scales smaller 100%, a quick glance at the toolbar on the side reveals quite a few new tools. There are a couple of new selection modes, none of which I think I will use, and a Photoshop style healing brush. Neat.

But the real kicker for me in the tools department are the new transformation tools. Any selection region or layer can be squished, scaled, rotated, perspective distorted, etc, using easy drag tabs. Which I think is just awesome. The previous transformation tools were almost universally difficult to use, some of them even required you to put in numbers and kind of guess what the result would look like. WYSIWYG tools like this are a great addition to the program.

One thing that I’m really curious to test out is memory consumption. The previous Gimp did a fairly poor job of managing memory, with layers taking up RAM according to the number of pixels on the layer, instead only storing portions of the layer that weren’t empty. I hit a few walls on larger images that required me to cut some corners and scale back a bit before, hopefully those times are a thing of the past now.

I haven’t really had a chance to get any hands on time with it yet, over the weekend I plan to do some coloring work to get used to the interface changes and such. Check back Monday-ish or so, I should have some new color work in the gallery by then.

New title, same great taste.
Yes, the site has indeed been renamed. All of the previous “caerplatypus.com” links should still work fine, including the RSS feeds, although I haven’t had a chance to test those properly yet so if they break, my apologies.

Earlier today, my brother was fishing around for a decent domain name for his up and coming site (expect some linkage action in the near future if he should follow through) and as joke I suggested “how about ‘Awesomeness in a Box’?”. Of course, it took me about PI/2 seconds to realize that that was the perfect name for my own site, and a quick check revealed that it wasn’t taken. Seriously, what are the odds of that? I’m telling you, it’s fate, baby! That, and I realized pretty quickly that “Caer Platypus” wasn’t exactly the best descriptive title for what I’m doing here. The fact that I have had to repeat it at least twice to every single person I’ve mentioned it to has made that perfectly, painfully clear. So farewell, oh Scottish castle of platypuses. You will be missed. But I’m keeping the platypuses.

Silas is coming along great, by the way. I think I’m good to be finished by the end of the month. I’ll be posting an update with some screens of cockroach panic and mayhem tomorrow.