Tuesday, November 11, 2014

testing...

testing..

6 comments:

Dean said...

It showed up on my blog feed if that helps your test ;)

Darkmatters said...

Haha Thanks Dean!! Actually I was trying to figure out why I've been having so many problems posting to my other blog. Apparently it's because Bloodspot has 'upgraded' so you need to have the absolute latest OS X. Just got done downloading and installing it.

Lol - just noticed Bloodspot - one of the best typos autocorrect has created yet! Lol!!

James said...

Hi Darkmatters,
what happened to your wonderful website darkstriders.net. It seems to be down. Are you updating it? There's a holding page with a notice to "buy this domain". Please can you let us know what is happening there. Thanks, because that is an awesome website full of great commentary, resources and links.

Best regards,
James.

Darkmatters said...

Hi James. It's with mixed regret and relief that I'm letting the site lapse. I purchased the domain way back before there was a YouTube or a Blogspot, and in order to post videos on the internet then you had to have a host site - one that you paid for on an ongoing basis. Since then of course things have changed immensely - not only can you host videos for free on YouTube, Vimeo or any number of other sites, but blogs allow you to also post written material and images for free as well. Not only that, but bandwidth has increased insanely since then, to the point that it's no problem for most people to stream videos in HD without waiting for buffering at all. Those little MOV files I was posting way back then were tiny because it was recommended clips be under 1 MB in filesize, otherwise too many people would have to wait a long time to let them load.

Well, today most people don't know what an MOV is or have the software to watch it! And they wouldn't understand why the clips are in such low resolution or so short, or why many of them have no sound (all to keep filesize down). As more time goes by the site got to seem more and more like an anachronism from some bygone age - I'm using Blogspot now,and YouTube if I ever want to upload a video file (which hasn't been for a long time).

So I decided to let it lapse. It just didn't seem like there was any reason to keep paying for it anymore - I didn't think anybody was even looking at it anymore.

Here's the link where you can see it in Archive.org's Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20080509061729/http://www.darkstrider.net/obscurities1.html

I'll post that link in the sidebar of this blog in case anyone else still remembers it and wants to visit. I just checked to make sure it was working, and was amazed to find the video clips are still functioning!! I didn't think it worked that way - text and images sure, but usually not the video. Maybe it's because they're quicktimes rather than flash? Or maybe it's because the files are still hosted on the server? Yeah, that's probably it. Anyway, at least it's still there in some form - actually virtually the same, as long as the clips still work. Wow, if I knew that, I would have probably done this a long time ago!!

Anyway, thanks for the interest! Hope that's a satisfactory solution.

James said...

Hi Darkmatters,

thank you for the reply and the link to your old site.
One thing about your old site was the wonderful short clips from classic animators, a whole stack of them which was an awesome resourse to show to beginners, all in one place on that site. Perhaps you would consider porting those wonderful clips over to Darkmatters? Of course, the link is useful and it's great that they are still there, as you say, but it would be a shame to loose them for example if they were removed from there at some future date.

Best regards,
James

Darkmatters said...

I don't know how much you understand about posting videos online, but there are some serious problems with that idea. The only way to post video clips on a blog is to have them hosted at a site like YouTube and then insert the embed code in a blog post. I don;t believe the clips I made so many years ago are in any format Youtube recognizes or accepts, meaning they'd need to first be recompressed into a different video format. They are very small to begin with and already heavily compressed - compressing them again would result in unwatchable video, aside from all of this taking a massive amount of time and effort.

At the time when I uploaded them on my site, I was deeply into the eastern European stopmotion and buying it up all the time, obsessed with it. I was making new discoveries about it all the time, which was exciting, and making those clips and uploading them was part of that passion. There's no way I can spare that kind of time or effort now, nor is it something I'm so deeply interested in anymore. If there was a simple way to transfer them over I'd be willing to at least try it and see how much work it would involve and how good the results are, but there's no simple way to do it.

If you want to be able to still watch them, download them. I've learned that's really the only way to preserve something posted to the net, and fortunately I have folders full of things I was foresighted enough to download that are now no longer available on the internet. I also recommend backing them up on an external hard drive or 2.

Then feel free to try to find a way to get them on the internet if you're so inclined. Personally I don't know of any way to do that without buying webspace and uploading them to a site you create for them.