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TomFulp
Hi there! In case you didn't know, I created newgrounds. No, it wasn't made by some giant company - just some dumb kid who now has help. I also co-founded the Behemoth; we made Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers. Icon by Pegosho, banner by OmenaKettu.

Age 45, Male

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Drexel

Glenside, PA

Joined on 12/15/99

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48 Hours

Posted by TomFulp - July 18th, 2007


I would say this has been a pretty eventful week! It all started on Monday, when Tim took the site down at 10am. Ross was still on the train and a bunch of us were having a last minute breakfast meeting, but I respect Tim's moxie with sticking to the schedule.


From this point forward, all the pressure was on Ross, LilJim and Tim to move everything over from staging and get it running in the new environment. Mike made some last minute tweaks to the audio player, Stamper and MindChamber worked on their Blamformers! submissions, Jeff worked on Comic-Con booth art, Bob tinkered with CSS and I prepped the final Blamformers .FLA file with over 30 submissions.


The team worked for the next 15 hours, until after 1am. Keep in mind, Ross had been up since at least 5am and LilJim is in the UK, meaning it was 6am his time when we stopped for the day.


I went home and got some sleep, then returned to the office at 7am with two dozen donuts and some bagels (the least I could do - although being excited about the redesign is hard work). Progress resumed for another nine hours, until we launched the site at 4pm. Blamformers launched about six hours later, after some Flash upload bugs were resolved.


I figure I might as well talk about Blamformers because that's what I worked on this week... Ross, Liljim and Tim can all post about their individual redesign launch experiences, because the credit all goes to them. I will say, we haven't broken out the beer yet!


So Blamformers was a lot of fun to put together. I was hoping a few more "award winning artists" would participate, but I didn't want to bug people to do it - I figured if there were any TF fans out there and they had the time, they would toss something together. Overall, the submissions we got were a lot of fun! I had to leave out a few submissions, due to matters such as file size and "flow", and it really does make me feel bad. I like to maximize happiness; I hate having to do something that hurts someone's feelings, especially after they've spent time creating something for my benefit. The artists who weren't included have probably been discouraged from participating in NG activities, which bums me out.


Still, I'm happy to have been able to squeeze over 30 submissions into 10 megs! There was hours of vector optimization and "symbolizing" involved, as I call it. A lot of people make 1 meg movies that can really fit in 100-200k if done right. Nowadays people don't worry so much about their filesize, but I still embrace the time when I was making Flash content for my 33.6k modem almost a decade ago. Kinda sad that I'm approaching a decade of Flash use, and my contribution to the collab was squiggly Autobot doodles, although I would rather make something that looks stupid and funny than something that looks like it took a lot of work and still ended up being lame. I suppose a lot of people around here do that, so we all gotta appreciate the stuff that looks nice. :)


ANYWAY... The navbar in the collab is actionscript-based, where the author name and music ID is a variable associated with each submission. This made everything easier to maintain as I added submissions and moved them around. The end of each movie calls a function that runs the logo transition then advances to the next submission. Originally, you could cycle from end to start and start to end in a loop, but I decided to stick with a more linear path where the collab had a definite start and a definite ending. I hope the NG logo at the end doesn't feel too smug. I'm always worried that we're getting too "smug" with our handsome staff icons, over-baked staff page and pat-yourself-on-the-back submission intros, but it's all in good fun and I like to think it adds to the excitement of everything we're doing. Just know that we don't take ourselves that seriously and we end up hating everything we make, either as we make it or shortly after. I still like the Blamformers collab, though, since I was only a small part of it. I fast forward past mine.


Other than that, I've been reading all the forum posts, reading the news and blog responses and reading the artist news posts! We're all jotting down notes and trying to set priorities, although right now the big priorities revolve around server performance, as mentioned in my latest front page post.


Comments

Hey, Tom... Awesome :)

Anyone else noticed that Newgrounds looks different than usual?

Phew!

That's a hell of a lot of work!

We appreciate it Tom!

The sight looks great, and it's nice to see so much effort put into a website.

The site looks fabulous, the artwork is just amazing, the whole site has had everything upgraded. It's an evolution in design and I hope you know that this movement of yours will also effect the flash artists here on Newgrounds. Well done! Congratulations to all the people behind the project, nice one!

hey that sounds awsome.
(i also think you should add some kind of feature that allow the users to be awared each time some artist post a news in their profile... like suscribitions or something like that, cause unless i visit your page i wont be able to know your personal stuffs(i mean those ones you dont put on the frontpage) ) i know, i know you have been working a lot on this redesing, is just an idea for later :P

Woah, karriston, good observation.

I like the way people on the internet understand sarcasm :)

Tom, you're really loving the ability to post news updates in your profile, aren't you? :D

Trust me, so am I. Well, I now have my own copies of Fireworks and Flash MX, so I'm looking forward to being featured in a collection! My art skills are minimalistic though. Meh, comes with time, right?

Yeah, I feel like I got my own private little club now. :)

And good luck with the upcoming Flash projects. :)

Glad to see yall put so much work into the site great job Tom

what i don't get is why, when you were creating the redesign, were the tank-men working in an environment which was completely unsuited to the job they were doing. they were welding in a room with very little light, not to mention you cant see a damn thing out of those visors anyway, until you turn on the blow torch that is. did you stop to consider their safety HUH, THEY COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED, then where would you be....y'know they could sue you.

i think you need to add "subscribe to user" that way if a user doesnt post for awhile i dont feel bad i missed it when he/she does. makes things a little easier. thats my two cents

remember, Patience is the companion of wisdom.

Wow, that's the most I've read online in a while. But Blamformers was cool, I wish that there were more entries, it was cool watching it. And the staff page is cool, the character select thing is a real time killer. I found the secret people too. Lol@Wadolf.

I'm digging the redesign so far. I wish I had a way to properly thank you guys, especially Ross and liljim for working themselves to exhaustion, for the hell you put yourselves through to get this up. I hope the fact that I'm enjoying it is thanks enough. And I guess I could just say thank you...so thanks.

Also I like the Pixel Puncher header, very classy.

Aww come on Tom. Don't feel so bad. I loved your entry.

Like many other people, I'm loving the redesign and trying to debunk those who think this will turn into another certain site.

One Week and One Day until Comic-Con. See you there.

life's though

the blamformers collab generally was good. I loved the second one you did, and the ones by Zekey and Stamper. (and that first one was good too). have to say, mindchambers ability to animate crazy stuff like that really scares the shit out of me :O.

anyway cheers on the new site, I think the layout looks quite nice, but it will take everyone a while to get settled. im still excited about the userpages though :D

- Anigen

Tom , the site is excellent dude!!

I thank you for putting all the hard work into making this brilliant site even more brilliant .

I really wanted to participate in the TF Collab, Tom, but I'm pulling another Blockhead marathon and I'm hard to sway from a path once I tread it.

If it's all the same, I may whip up a little Transformers Bytesize for you. But I mean, I really loved that series growing up, so I think I would have rather animated a tribute than a parody. You know, really dedicate something to it.

Maybe that was the problem? That it was too hard for TF loyalists and enthusiasts to parody the series when all they wanna do is put together a kickass tribute instead.

Yeah, it might have been the whole fan-appreciation thing that made it hard to pick on Transformers, although the movie provided plenty of fodder. :)

I'm already getting some great ideas for collabs right now... I might have to announce a new one soon. :)

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