If you haven't noticed already, we have created new email notifications templates. Not only are they much nicer, but the comment and message email notifications also contain the content in the email itself so you don't always have to jump to Artician to find out what's going on. Enjoy the ease of use

Don't forget you can always adjust your email notifications in your Account Settings

Here is a quick look at the new styles:

Dylan Cole is a world-known concept artist that works within several industries at any given time. His work has been seen throughout many of the worlds most amazing movies such as Lord of the Rings all the way to Narnia.
If you want to ask a question to Dylan Cole, Artician.com is giving you the chance to ask it -- Sometime in the middle of November a Artician staff member shall be asking the questions from the public to Dylan Cole himself.





The rules are very clear really, and that is not to use profanity and please think of unique questions to ask!



I'd like the closing date to be around 10/11/2009!, Plenty of time to think up those questions guys!

So, what are you waiting for?, Get working on those questions, post them in this blog and your questions may just be asked to Dylan Cole himself!

Just a small update on some load time improvements...

Some of you may have noticed at times when browsing the site, specifically when viewing a userpage or a submission page, there could be a good 12-20 second delay for the page loaded. This is due to the Friends of Friends functionality that is better known as your "Creative Network".

The bottom line is, the amount of data that was needed to be processed when either you add or remove a friend, and even if your friends add or remove a friend, was quite significant. This was something that was really starting to get on our nerves, and probably many of you have noticed...

Thanks to Brandon (aka knightar), this has been fixed (and hopefully will continue to scale) as the site grows... Enjoy smooth browsing!

We are happy to announce the Artician Userpage Twitter module, which easily allows you to share your twitter updates on your profile. It's super easy to add, and should take less 30 seconds, so if you have a Twitter page, get started below!

The following link will bring you to your profile in customization mode. When the page loads, the twitter module settings will appear. Simply fill out the settings in the settings box, then click "Save".

Add the Twitter Module to your profile:


Please Note: If you have a custom page setup, you will need to manually add the twitter module to your userpage. This can be done, by going to Customize > Page Setup, and pasting [mod:twitter] into your page setup. This is a standard userpage module so you can add it wherever you want.

to find out who is already on our scout team, click here

If you have any questions and query's don't hesitate to post a comment in this blog article, or message me via Artician!

Thank you all for waiting so patiently!

We'd like announce the launch of Artician's Official Facebook Application! That's right, it's finally here! Although still very simple and very basic we are happy to let you know that you can share your Artician portfolio with all your friends on facebook! Suggestions and feedback are all welcome, and we hope to continue to approve the app as time goes on.

To get started checkout our Application profile page, then click the "Go to Application" button.

Big news has hit the web! As some of you may or may not have heard, the Internet giant Youtube has recently placed a banner at the top of the site that asks users who are still using IE6 to upgrade to a modern web browser such as Firefox 3.5, IE8, or Google Chrome. But this news is already a week old, so why I am I posting about it right now? Good question!

That is because Artician is joining the congo line in supporting and informing users that they must update their web browsers. We too will drop support for IE6 in the coming months. We have already placed a notice to IE6 users that they should update their web browsers. Finally, with Youtube's bold step leading the way, thousands of companies and organizations, have and will begin to follow, which will ultimately result in the passing of IE6.

From my own experience, I could not tell you how many countless hours I have spent trying to force IE6 to function and display webpages properly. For every new feature or update, 25%-45% of development time was dedicated to satisfying IE6. Now we can take that extra time to improve, and develop new features, and not waste it for the small percent who are too ignorant to update their browsers.

A big thanks goes to out to Youtube, who is not the first, but certainly the biggest company to put their foot down. The web can now proceed as planned...

We hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far! You know the Artician Team is due to the lack of updates and feature releases Even though we'd love to continue joining you and your friends on the beach, sipping down Piña coladas, and partying to the break of dawn, we gotta get back to work!

On that note, we are resuming full swing development and hope to have some really awesome improvements and new features to share with the Artician Community in the near future. More rounds of promotion are scheduled towards early-mid august.

We are also now running on our new infrastructure, in which we have doubled capacity for server processing, and performance. Everything has been running smoothly for a few weeks now, so the turbulence should be long gone now.

Anyway lookout for updates in the near future! Happy Articianing!

As some of you know the site has been slow as of late (Development wise and speed wise) and this is because of us going though a restructuring process which includes virtualizing all our servers. This process took about 2 months to do, one server at a time while making sure our setup is redundant and backed up.

This weekend is the final stage of our restructuring, We will be moving to a different data center. While we are moving we will be upgrading all our servers with more ram, and more processors. Our main server (Ren) and our database server (Stimpy) will both have a second processor added and an extra 4GB of ram installed to make it 8GB of ram each, our storage server (Skeeter) will have an extra 2GB installed to also make it 8GB, and finally our dedicated virtual server machine (Rocko) will be upgraded to an incredible 24GB of ram!

The move should be starting sometime after 12 midnight Saturday morning or Sunday morning and last for up to 8 to 12 hours. There's a possibility of downtime so don't be surprised if the site is inaccessible during the day.

We will keep everyone updated on our Twitter page during the move.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have removed the individual Control Panel section known as "User Images". Instead we have implemented it into the Profile Control Panel section. Just trying to simplify things where we can. The new profile images are now using the flash uploader. If anyone has any issues with it, please let us know here.

Some further news to come...

Artician Groups
New Activity / Notification system
Moving to a new Data Center
Major Server Upgrades

Artician is now accepting Artician Scout Applications

Check it out, see what it's about, and let us know if you are interested!

We have recently begun what we'd like to call "round three" of Artician’s promotional phase. You will notice a large increase of site activity, which in all honesty is overwhelming at the moment. Traffic as a whole will continue to grow rapidly, whether we like it or not (But of course, that‘s why we’re here ^_^). Here are some recent updates that we’d like to throw your way…

Server Updates

We are close to conquering the rest of our Server Maintenance, and Upgrades, which may still cause a bit of turbulence in the near future, but no serious downtime should occur.

Artician Scout Team

We will be making some updates within the next few days about the Artician Scout team. We will begin accepting volunteers, and hope to get a good response like we did when it was initially introduced. More info about Artician Scouts can be found here: http://blog.artician.com/blog/2009/03/artician-scouts-we-want-you/ We are looking for as much help as possible in welcoming new users and guiding them when help is needed. Scouts will also be seeking out talented work, along with the other responsibilities mentioned in the detailed blog post above.

Documentation

On another note, we’d like to apologize for the lack of documentation up until this point. Artician is growing and evolving so quickly that it’s become difficult to keep up with. The good news is, we will be working on new documentation over the next few weeks, including screencasts and more interactive tutorials to help users with Customization, Account / Profile Management, and all the other yummy stuff.

Groups are coming soon!

We will soon be finishing the Artician Groups System, which we know you are all waiting for so patiently. We are confident that it will bring about new aspects of social activity and interaction on Artician. Groups will first be rolled out to Beta Testers and Artician Pro users, as it will still be in beta. However, it will only remain in beta for a very short time since groups has been pretty well tested thus far.

Keep on Truckin’…

We are working on a whole bunch of other stuff behind the scenes, which of course will make it to a browser near you! Thanks for all the community support!

Literature

Literature Submission category is now live. You can submit text-based submissions such as poetry and prose. Please note that importing literature from other sites is not yet available.

Artisan Crafts

Another new media type has been added called "Artisan Crafts". The purpose of this new category is to handle tangible artwork, such as sculpture, woodwork, etc. If you have any submissions that were previously categorized in Art and Photography, that need to be updated, you can use your Portfolio Manager to do so.

The server doctors are in the house…

As you may or may not have noticed there was some unexpected downtime during the past few days on Artician. Instead of moaning and groaning about the server maintenance, we decided to take advantage of this time to update our infrastructure to help prevent future downtime due to performance issues, and hardware failures.

What caused the downtime?

Over the past few days, Artician’s primary static content server decided to act a bit silly. No, but really, the current raid system needs to be resynced, and due to the size of our storage this process just isn’t that easy. There was no data loss, and your stuff is safe. We even decided to begin storing an additional offsite backup of our entire infrastructure, just to be extra safe. As a result, some features are still temporarily unavailable, such as: Submitting, Portfolio Manager, Customization, and Profile Image Uploading.

How will we prevent downtime in the future?

With Artician’s current cluster of servers, each machine maintains a particular role and handles specific tasks assigned to it. When any given machine has a performance or hardware failure, it could result in serious compromising of Artician’s functionality. As we all know, hardware could go bad, and it’s not something we should ever play a game of risk with. Even though we always keep backups of everything, the time it takes to restore a server’s state from a hardware failure could take hours, or in worse cases even days. We are now establishing a virtualization process to re-comprise our server infrastructure into a virtual cluster. Running at native speeds, each machine will no longer be forced into only being able to handle its own tasks. If any hardware or performance failures occur on any individual machine, we can easily clone the tasks of that server on any other machine to prevent downtime or feature unavailability. This will provide us the flexibility we need when dealing with future system maintenance, upgrades, and expansion.

When will everything be cool?

We are hoping to have the site back to normal early this week, but stay check back soon for future announcements. There is no need to worry, Artician will be back to 100% in no time, and we will be looking forward to round three of our promotional stage.

Artician's official blog is now here! "Artician Labs" is built on the new and upcoming groups platform that will be released on Artician within the next few weeks. Artician's blog will take place of the previous method of making global announcements through the discussion forum. Artician Labs aims to inform users of new features, and important announcements on Artician, and will be updated regularly. We will also be allowing public user participation in providing feedback and suggestions.

We hope that Artician Labs will provide a more profound environment for Artician staff to collaborate, as well as a friendlier method of keeping the community up to date.

We have done our best to migrate over existing posts and comments from the announcements forum, but due to some complications, some data could not be ported over. Either way, a fresh new start is always a good thing.

We've been notified of some minor spam related incidents. We will be working very hard to fight spam and bots from being able to abuse Artician, and it's members. This is something that comes with large amounts of traffic, and we just have to do our best to deal with it.

What should I do if I see or receive spam related content?
Please report the content right away. We have a "Report" button on nearly every piece of content. Comments, Submissions, Private Messages, Userpages....This will notify the correct authorities on Artician. Please do not send administrators private messages, or email us. The report system was built to efficiently deal with these types of things.

Thanks for everyone's cooperation!

You asked, we listened. Artician is working on literary support for submitting all kinds of writing and text based media. We will post updates in this topic, but we decided to announce it since we were receiving so many questions and emails about it. We hope to encourage and support literary talent, and will do our very best to attend to the needs of this creative crowd. Thanks for your feedback! First step for us is developing the category system. Once we have a rough draft, we will post here for additions, suggestions, and feedback from the community... Keep on rockin! :)

http://chris.pirillo.com/what-web-communit...do-artists-use/

"I’ve long believed that creativity is the pinnacle of intelligence… to take something that is in your head and create something that the rest of the world can enjoy. It just doesn’t get better than that. I’m not creative in the least. I just sit here and talk and wave my hands around! Luckily, I have many friends who are creative.

So how do artists connect online? I’m glad you asked! A creative friend of mine recently started a new website called Artician for just this purpose. Artician is a new community for creative professionals! They make it easy for anyone to build, manage and customize their portfolio. They also promote and feature creative talent… showing your work to the World!"....Read More

Artician Scouts?

As Artician grows (very quickly) we are looking to create a new group of user status'. This user group will be known and referred to as "Artician Scouts". Sounds interesting, you may say to yourself...what's it all about?

Artician is growing, Fast.

Because Artician is growing so rapidly, it is becoming quite difficult for Artician developers, and even Artician Moderators to keep an eye on all the wonderful talent that Artician has been receiving lately. At this point, thousands of new submissions are coming in daily, and we want to give everyone a chance to shine, especially if they really deserve it. To ensure that no one goes unnoticed, we will do what it takes to keep pushing forth talent, and providing recognition to those diligent hard-working artists, designers, and photographers in the Artician community.

So, how are we going to do this?

A new team will be assembled on Artician to be known as "Artician Scouts". The primary task of this newly accumulated team will to be seek out talented work found on Artician, as well as other community oriented tasks which are listed below. We hope that by creating a large team of scouts we could expand our seeking ability to provide recognition to artists who would otherwise be lost in the mix. Artician is dedicated to finding alternatives in creative promotion rather than just relying on programmatic algorithms to "find talent, popular users, and good content". In retrospect, we anticipate a preliminary scout team starting out with about 25-30 people..

What will Scouts do?

• Will have methods to browse content on a mass scale.
• Will be able to influence a featured status on a submission by adding it to a que for further review.
• Will be able to moderate content on a basic level, such as "Flag, as mature", or "Correct a category".
• Will have the responsibility to be involved with the community, welcome to new users, and guide them with they need help.
• Users who are a part of the Scout team will be recognized as such by their account status.

Sounds cool, I'd like to join...

Artician Scouts will be in effect by the end of March 2009. We will be open to accepting users to be a part of the Scout team. The primary attribute we will be looking for is dedication. If you've been on Artician for a little while, you simply have a better chance of joining the Artician Scout team. However, we've seen plenty of new users who took Artician by storm, and have just be a pleasure to see all around the site. Friendly, patient, influential, and helpful are all keywords that describe a member of the Scout team..

I have an idea!

If you do, then we want to hear it! Our concepts are fresh, and ready for molding. We would love to hear feedback and suggestions that would improve the formation, organization, and goals of the Artician Scout team. Even if you have other, yet relevant ideas for promoting users, and talent found Artician - we totally are all ears..

So, with that said, we will soon begin working on this new platform for Artician Scouts, and you will certainly know the difference. As much as us developers love being involved with the community, we need help from you :) Like I always say... Community, you are awesome.

Hello every body! It has come to our attention that some of our users have been getting spammed through their private messaging system. We would like you to know that we ARE aware of the problem and are working to get this straightened out as I am typing this message.

Please continue to report any forms of spam or harrassment so it can be dealt with right away!

Thank you and have a great day!

Artician Pro is Here!

(Below is an edited version of our welcome message to Pro Users)
Take advantage of Artician Pro features, as well as the removal of annoying advertisements from Artician, and anyone who views your content / portfolio. Artician Pro users entitled to additional exposure, which you will notice around the the rest of the site, and anytime we update Artician Pro and it's features you will automatically be eligible to use them. We plan to continue adding, improving and assembling new and exciting features to keep Artician Pro up to date and perpetually serving your needs as a creative professional.

---

Here are some things we're keeping in mind to make Artician Pro as useful as possible to you.

• We know you have clients or other outside crowds that will be looking at your work. That's why we focus on presenting your work in the most efficient and professional way possible - without all fluffy stuff.


• Being a creative professional is no easy task, and requires much time and effort. We make it quick and easy to maintain your work, so you can focus on what you do best.


• We all have our ups and downs, and sometimes all it takes is a little extra inspiration to complete a project with full satisfaction. Now you can browse artician with 150 thumbnails per page so you can soak up all the inspiration you need to get that spark.


• Communicating with other Artician Pro's is essential. Collaboration, teamwork, and feedback is what will be pushing you to the top. Here in the forums, you can privately discuss with other Artician Pro users to get the premium advice you've been looking for all along.


• Getting recognition and exposure these days, is like trying to make your own parachute in mid-air while skydiving. You can't keep up, and eventually you're gonna' crash. Artician does it's unrivaled best to promote YOU and your work - above all the rest.

...We are not done yet either!

Artician Developers are working around the clock to perpetually improve Artician Pro. Not only to scale and deliver, but to meet the real needs of Creative Professionals around the globe. We will continue to listen to your feedback and implement your ideas to ensure that Artician Pro isn't just something that is "nice to have", but something that you can rely on to cater to your professional needs.

As we get ready for second phase promotion, we have released another very beneficial utility for new users of Artician. The Artician Wizard is a simple guided, step by step process that helps newcomers easily populate primary profile information and user content to their profile. Once a new user signs up on Artician, they are immediately guided to the wizard. Because it is optional, the user can also choose to skip the wizard at any point.

We hope this help get new Artician users started with their basic profile information.

Screenshot:

(The overall process shows one stage at a time, with a sleek horizontal scrolling effect)

Just a small update that I'm sure everyone would be glad to hear about. We've been getting a rapid pace of submissions and are now up to 25,000! Congrats to the Artician community for all the support!

We hope to see the numbers to continue to grow because to put it simply, our servers are hungry! So far, Artician's infrastructure and platform has been scaling better then we had hoped, our server's aren't even breaking a sweat! You know what that means right? Yepp.... I can haz submissions?

Keep em' coming folks!

There are so many more features to come, you have no idea.

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to announce some new features before we move into second phase promotion, which will be happening very very soon!

We have just released a powerful new invite system that allows you to invite friends and contacts from a vast selection of email service providers and social networks alike. The new viral invite system provides the ability to login to any of the services shown below to retrieve a list of your contacts. After doing so, you can select which contacts or friends you'd like to invite. Artician will automatically send them an email invitation, OR if you are using a social network, it will send them a private message on that network.

We encourage everyone to invite their friends, or anyone that would find Artician beneficial

Invite Your Friends!

Screenshots:

Hey all,

This news is a few days old, but thought it would be nice to share with everyone none the less. Artician was reviewed on Web Worker Daily (GigaOM blog site) by Darrel Etherington. He gave an honest review from his standpoint as an existing DeviantART user, and mentioned some great things about Artician. Read up...

http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/02/17/artic...-creative-work/


Because the GigaOM network has become a influential blogging news network, this article was also fed onto:

CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom...ative_work.html

Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/tech/giga_om/web_life...work/index.html

Notice:

Artician will be entering the second phase of promotion at the end of the month. We will be expecting large surges of traffic, and new users to Artician. At that time we will be ready to promote some new Moderators, and create another user status known as "Scouts". Scouts will generally be the "eyes" of Artician, and the primary task of this newly assembled team will to be seek out talented work on Artician, and influence a featured status on submissions. The featured work will ultimately will be reviewed by Admin's and soon probably Mods as well. We will create a dedicated topic for Scouts with more details, so look out for that soon as well. (Just to ensure there is no confusion, the Featured Work system will not be entirely controlled by Scouts, other logical algorithms will play their role as well)

Otherwise, get ready to welcome many more new users and talent to Artician. We also have been busy on some new things, which will be announced in the near future. Artician Pro, and Artician Groups are still under development, but they are both 95% complete. We are just tying em' up, and smoothing little things out.

A small word to the community.."You are awesome!"

Hey everyone,

First off, I'd like to welcome all these wonderful new users around here. It's such a pleasure to see many new faces, and beautiful portfolios.
We are very busy working on some great new features including Artician Groups, and Artician Pro. For this topic, we'd like to get some of your feedback on Artician Pro, so we can truly give what the community wants.



Artician Pro is a subscription based service for $4.95/mo on Artician. It will provide additional features and a more professional mark on your Account. Some of the things included in Artician Pro are:

• No Ads on the site at all, and ads are even removed from your userpage and content when people are viewing.
• Allow users to keep ads, and make money off them new!
• Browse up to 150 submissions per page in Browse sections
• More visitors to your userpage
• Unlimited Access to Pro Resources. (This will be done in the near future when we develop a resources section)
• First notice on Events, Contests and New Features
• Link your own domain to your userpage new!
• Hide network bar to guests (black bar at the top of every page of artician) new!

As of now, these are all the things that we have been able to think of for Artician Pro accounts. We really want to hear your ideas, and what you'd like to have if you were getting a Pro Account. What sort of things would be useful to you as an artist, designer or photographer managing a portfolio. Anything that would help you manage your portfolio, be more professional, or simply make your experience on Artician better.

Any feedback, ideas, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Cmon.. don't hold back, we know your thinking of something, and we're here to listen.

To all those facebook users out there, come join us!

Hey Everyone...

We've got a small feature update to announce! We have just released a nifty little feature that will be extremely useful when browsing work on Artician. You will now notice, when you place your mouse cursor over the thumbnails in browse, or on the homepage, you will see more details smoothly slide up revealing the user who posted it, the category it was posted in, and the date it was uploaded. We may change or add some minimal info to the detail hovers, but you get the gist! View the screenshot below and enjoy! :)

See it in Action

[b][size=3]Help Us Spread the Word![/size][/b]

We are happy to announce that we are finally entering official promotion stages of Artician! As we are eagerly finishing up some of the last features and fixes, we are now ready to give Artician the full attention it deserves on the marketing end.

[b]For those of you who are new to Artician[/b], you should know that it's been a long journey in the development of a perfect place for Artists, Designers, and Photographers, to come and create a fully customizable portfolio that is ideal in many, many ways. Artician gives you the tools you need to harness the benefits of a creative professional social network, along with a powerful portfolio and web presence to promote your work. To learn more, check out the [b][url=http://tour.artician.com]Artician Tour[/url][/b]

[b]For those of you who have been a part of the community[/b], or have been keeping any eye on the development of Artician, you are probably well aware of how much time, effort, and nourishment went into creating what we’d like to call this beast, Artician.

Now, we need your help to provide Artician with the recognition that the rest of the web unknowingly anticipates. For the next few weeks, we are going to be giving it our all in spreading the word about this wonderful place. This includes newsletters, advertising, promotions, link exchanges, public relations, press releases, and social network communication. But in fact, our undoubtedly best weapon in completing this goal is You. The Artician Community can do more than any of the above methods combined, and any help we receive will be recognized and applauded. Please take a moment to see what you can do to help...

[b][size=3]How can you help?[/size][/b]

We are on the hunt for links! We are looking for as many URLs as possible related to Art, Design, Photography, Web Design, or any Creative website to help get the word around. A topic has been started a little while back by Mark Skully dedicated to this. Post up your favorite links! It could be Art Communities, Galleries, Blogs, Personal Portfolios, Social Networks, Resource websites etc. Every link counts! [b][url=http://www.artician.com/forum/Places-to-promote-Artician-t573.html]Post your links here![/url][/b]

[b][size=3]Other ways to support Artician[/size][/b]

[b][size=3]Some Other things to keep in mind... [/size][/b]

Within the next few weeks, we will be scheduling a "Digg it" day. This will be a specified time that we can attempt to make it to the front page of digg, with the help of our community. Please check back soon for postings with detail time and information. Thanks for all the support shown up until this time, and many thanks to our dedicated users who are always there to help.