Tzigla Rocks!!!

[Mathias]

@Mathias:
I think a few of your ideas might be possibly the responsiblity of the moderator of the board.

For example, I like your idea of structured boards.  If a rough image, much as you demonstrated, were placed as the background texture and the moderator simply enforced the requirements, wouldn't it work as the system is now?

What is this Sec Specs? haha. (SUPER SECRET REFERENCE)
Actually Gizmodic I strongly disagree with my fists clenched as I type, which slows my typiing dramatically. Try it for second, you'll see what I mean. Allowing this feature but expecting the mod to custom create his own bg image in an image editor vastly reduces it's convenience. Non-artists are going to have a heck of a time creating a gridded image using the same grid as the collab. It has to be pixel perfect. The tile given for artists to download will need to have it's respective chunk of the bg image. Among other reasons.

But, here's how I see it working:

Mod is given a config page:
1 ) He chooses number of rows/columns.
2 ) Chooses how many tiles per row/col, which determines tile total.
3 ) If chooses structured theme, he then gets  a page where he creates his own custom grid.
4 ) He's presented with a level designer of sorts. 10 or so slots he labels and chooses a color for.
5 ) Then each tile can be color-coded as any of his labels.
6 ) So, on the board when it goes live, the artists see the grid all color-coded along with the color key and a description of the theme so they know what's what.



___________

When a board is complete it should register as a board event, therefore getting an entry in the comments panel. Maybe with a special green background so it's easy to find. Maybe the Tzigla account could even post the notification, but it should occur instantly, as soon as the board is done.

Concerning the comments panel, it would be nice to be able to temporarily "reset" the board back to the state it was in when each comment or listed event entry was made. Could be done by including a link or button in each comment panel entry you could click or rollover to momentarily re-mask the tiles as they were when the entry was made.





Board Creation. Will non-mod's, like me, ever gain the ability to start their own board? And, will they be able to make private boards, which are invitation-only?

[Argyle]

I just now found the original thread for Patratzel near the bottom of the first page of the general section of the forums.  I feel like kind of a jerk for not having taken notice of it until now, since I check Tzigla almost as much as I check my e-mail, haha.  Thanks for keeping up the dev work on this so ambitiously, even though the interest in it appeared less than what it might have been, just based on the reply count of that first thread.  <3 There's so many sticky threads that it's pretty easy to miss something new on the general boards I guess.

[evilchelu]

Mathias, thanks so much for the praise and ideas. You rocks our socks! Replying below:

1 )  Scrollbar style. Default scrolbars lookin' tacky.
Meh, kinda agree but on the other hand I don't mind so much => in todo, low priority

2 )  Rollover tile highlights (DONE)
YAY

3 )  Remove "showing all" and "showing only comments" text, use more minimal buttons instead of links as well  -OR-   could be one toggle button that changes per state.
Indeed, this bit of UI will improve, it was just added fast to please people

4 )  Format artist list into columns (truncate usernames to minimum char count so cols can be standard widths?)
Disagree. Having them structured will attract more attention from the board than having it look like text. We might add an option to sort by most tiles tho.
We're also thinking of putting them someplace else tho.

5 )  Live updates, w/o reloads - Auto-update comments/events, even artist list and tile quantities, every minute or so  -OR-  when something changes only.
Agree. On the list already as part of... optimization, if you can imagine

6 )  When artist is clicked, show each graphical tile done, along with tile name.
Disagree. It just doesn't fit in the interface without cluttering, well, unless we take the events stream away when viewing an artist.
Might not be needed since we'll be adding a separate profile page soon, then we'll have a links that says, open full profile in a separate page.

7 )  Precede board events, in comment window, with a relevant icon, indenting them. My concern is better differentiating them from comments, since comments are most likely the higher priority when looking through that comment window list.
Agree.

8 )  Tile names are great to have now but they still don't really allow you to quickly locate a tile when you only have it's name. Maybe number rows and columns, with little numbers at top/side of each col/row. Furthermore, hex tiles pretty much defy rows and columns. I don't see how a column-row naming convention will work for them. I suggest plain old numbers, ie: 01, 02, 03, etc.
Actually, whytf aren't we just highlighting stuff like 5-6 already (without the #, that is). It's not like people normally type 4-3, 7-2 and such in normal conversation.
Might add the little numbers, tho I'm not yet convinced they add that much. Would probably make more sense to have numbers directly on the tile, but that's too noisy. Maybe temporarily add numbers to all only when a tile is selected or hovered.
Hexes can be numbered almost the same.

9 )  Add time/date stamps to board events/comments
Will probably add just to comments. Events will be in context and they're less important.
Also, we'll probably add "2 minutes ago" style timestamps since everyone is on another timezone and absolute time is bleh.

10 ) Thumbnails on main page are a nice touch but don't seem to help much if not up to date.
We're annoyingly practical. It took less time to make some screenshots than to implement the feature We'll be making them work for real soon tho.

11) Imposed themes. Not sure about imposing themes to begin with really. You may've noticed that I completely disregarded the quack ducks pond theme for the first collab. It simply didn't appeal to me. Without doing this one might think that all collabs will just kinda look the same, which is probably not true. I can see the logic in having a theme - something to provide unity for the whole thing. Thinking more about it, I guess I'd like having themes, if I actually liked the theme; if it worked for me.
Some collabs theme ideas: Aliens/monsters VS. Robots,   Vegetables VS. Fruit (cartoon chars at war),   Underground,   Underwater,   Sky.
Debatable. I think themes must be generic enough and not really enforced. But it's nice when there's at least some sort of common idea. You theme ideas are better than ours

12 ) Convert links to clickable hyperlinks in chat.
Soon, but then we have to worry more about security. People can link to bad things, etc.

13 ) Gotta remedy those color issues. Top-right of quack quack collab has obvious issues especially where there's blue on both sides of the tile seams in question.
Already fixed for quack board, as you know. Working on a built-in fix right now.

re: the seethrough instead of black
My reply to gizmo saying "you may" meant... give me a suggested texture for the pixel boards cos i can't come up with one. But maybe ptoing or somebedy else that does pixels is a better idea, since gizmo only participates in the normal boards I think (hi gizmo )

re: structures boards
Already on the list. But high demand means we might work on it faster than we thought
First, I just want to say: really nice mockups!

But, I agree with gizmo. Uploading a pic is the simples solution that gives most of the desired features. You're trying to put too much structure on it.

Not every joe user will be an admin, so sketching something is decent is kinda easy. The sketch doesn't have to fit exactly on tiles. We'll just cut it up when a user downloads the tile and give them whatever happens to be there. If the idea is decently explained in the description (we might add a bigger field for that), people will kinda get it that they're around the castle, grass, underwater, sky, etc area. And the point of it's that it doesn't have to be exactly that, maybe someone decides to have a ladder starting from the castle and continuing up to the stars, you never know

re: board completed event
Nice to have, probably useless in practice. It'll quickly be overwhelmed by comments and fade away

[evilchelu]

I just now found the original thread for Patratzel near the bottom of the first page of the general section of the forums.  I feel like kind of a jerk for not having taken notice of it until now, since I check Tzigla almost as much as I check my e-mail, haha.  Thanks for keeping up the dev work on this so ambitiously, even though the interest in it appeared less than what it might have been, just based on the reply count of that first thread.  <3 There's so many sticky threads that it's pretty easy to miss something new on the general boards I guess.

Don't worry about it, it's all in the past. We eventually made it through that phase because we're crazy and just didn't give up. Thanks for loving tzigla!

btw: the best way to show your appreciation is making more people happy by encouraging them to make tiles 

[evilchelu]

ptoing is the first moderator and the only one for pixelation (unless he wants to propose more) and we love him cos he always believed in tzigla and helped us get off the ground .

Anyway, let's talk about non-pixel boards.

The problem with creating/moderating is that you shouldn't draw more than one tile (the first one). There's no real technical restriction preventing you to make more tiles, but you'd have an unfair advantage then. Also, it's unglorified work. You have to look at tiles fast, have accounts on twitter/facebook/pixelation, then contact people to nicely tell them why you sent back or rejected their tile, etc. It's practically more customer support than having fun.

We really want to have other people be moderators tho, but not too many because we don't want to have 10 boards going in parallel.

Now that I scared you, we really don't want to be moderating boards and we'd love someone else to do it.

Also, the actions of an admin will reflect upon tzigla, so for us is important who gets to be a mod.

Are you willing to put in the work? To promote your board nicely without spamming (as this reflects badly on tzigla), to try to find users for you board, to be nice even tho people are being nasty/hateful?

We have only two advanced boards(2 and 4) and one newbie board(5) up for grabs for now. And I don't want to add too many "in progress" boards so until we have enough users to make enough tiles on tzigla, we're not going to let you create boards yourself, just by request.

So, who wants to be a mod?

[Argyle]

With all the horrible tear jerking reasons NOT to be a moderator that you just listed aside, and even though I love Tzigla oh so much, I'm not consistently available nearly enough to justify volunteering.  Hope somebody comes along to free you up from having to do it AND develop at the same time though!

[Commander Gizmo]

Two more interface suggestions for you.

• Create a toggle button to hide the side bar with the event stream.  This allows a much more epic view of the actual board when desired, and helps when on non standard resolutions (like my tablet/phone).  You might also make he width sizable using the mouse. (Hello jQuery!)
• Create a slide out selector list of the boards when viewing a board.  It would probably work best with smaller thumbnails and the text names or maybe just the text names.  If a person is interested in several boards, it might be nice to switch back and forth, or check for progress quickly once the thumbnails are automated.

[Mathias]

• Create a slide out selector list of the boards when viewing a board. . .

Yayuh. Just a simple drop-down box with collab names would be a great usability improvement.

(check that list tag formatting!)

[evilchelu]

Two more interface suggestions for you.

• Create a toggle button to hide the side bar with the event stream.  This allows a much more epic view of the actual board when desired, and helps when on non standard resolutions (like my tablet/phone).  You might also make he width sizable using the mouse. (Hello jQuery!)
• Create a slide out selector list of the boards when viewing a board.  It would probably work best with smaller thumbnails and the text names or maybe just the text names.  If a person is interested in several boards, it might be nice to switch back and forth, or check for progress quickly once the thumbnails are automated.

<3 gizmo

re: toggle-able sidebar: Might do that, but probably just for the complete boards. We actually had a version a few weeks ago with this type of sidebar and it kinda sucked.

re: mobile version: We had to break the mobile version to get the new sidebar in place, but we'll fix it soon. It might be that on mobile stuffs you'll just be able to see either the sidebar or the content, but not both since they most likely won't fit properly.

re: slide out selector of boards: Definitely! I want that too.

We're currently working on the homepage (which truly sucks, btw) and it's tough since we're not really designers

ps: what's up with the pixelation board? It makes me really sad that people seem to have given up on it. As I said earlier, it would really suck for all the people that worked on it already to have it die off

[Commander Gizmo]

A few more suggestions, because it's easier than actually implementing them:

Homepage

• Beef It Up
  The interface seems too minimal.  It almost feels like the site is empty or being swallowed by the void.  Perhaps the following suggestions will help?
• Categories
  The boards could be sorted by categories, such as Skill Required, Pixel/Painting/Theme, Progress (percent completed), etc.
• Board Description Wrapping Text
  If the text over the thumbnails wrapped around the status text things would look much more fluid and much of the wasted 'void' space in the layout would seem to disappear.
• Color!
  I like dark base colors on a site as much as the next guy (more probably), but Tzigla's home page could do with a splash of color.  Not so much that it detracts from the board thumbnails though.  It needs to say, "Come on in and join the fun!"  I'm guessing some brighter elements would make it feel more active and vibrant.
• A Drop of Community
  A listing of the most recently added users or a stream of the most recent events (+comments?) would add a lot of community feel to the homepage while also making it feel active and busy.  A global chat box would probably be too much, but maybe it's worth consideration.

Boards

• Grab'n'Pan
  I would love to see a way to grab the board and drag it like you can in PS.  Those scroll bars are pretty annoying.
• Pop Out View
  It would be cool to have a button that triggered a 'pop out view', shrinking or expanding the board to the largest possible size that will fit in the browser window without cropping any of the board.  This would be a great way to view the over all board and take in the entire masterpiece.

[ptoing]

To anyone who might be interested.

I love Tzigla, it is a cool system and evilchelu and dira have put an assload of work into it. Now the question I am having is why is no one participating in the pixel collab one? Because it is not Hex? Why? let us know. It does not help the people involved staying motivated when no one uses their stuff?

[Batzy]

I really like this project and how much you have worked for it please continue doing so  also Mathias dammit with those looong crits/ideas sometimes even i'm too lazy to read them.

I don't really know why other people including me doesn't use tzigla and that is really a shame  but i know that it would really help if you would spread out some word about tzigla i dunno if there is any topic at pixeljoint but that's a nice place to start  also before you ask why i don't use tzigla? i'm going to make one or two tiles soon to tzigla i hope i've been watching the progress till now

I don't have any crits/suggestions now how to make tzigla better but i do have a tiny suggestion for pixelation i think it would be really great if there would be a link to tzigla similar to that donate link cause i would really like quickly get to tzigla watch the daily progress and not always try finding a link to tzigla from my bookmarks or from this topic etc.

[BrandonD]

To anyone who might be interested.

I love Tzigla, it is a cool system and evilchelu and dira have put an assload of work into it. Now the question I am having is why is no one participating in the pixel collab one? Because it is not Hex? Why? let us know. It does not help the people involved staying motivated when no one uses their stuff?

I love Tzigla also, this is the first collab that's ever motivated me to get off my butt and contribute - I'd contribute more tiles but I'm working on a contract project currently... and also since this is my first collab effort I don't wanna be annoying and make a ton of tiles.

But I really do hope that this collab gets finished, I'm very excited to see the final product!

[Mathias]

How is Tzigle being exposed? How can we boost awareness?

[Commander Gizmo]

Somebody make a youtube video of quack quack coming together and write a blog post or 3 about it quick!  That should stir up some attention.  I would, except that I don't have a blog and I'm up to my chin in travel plans.

[32]

I think the reason I and possibly other people aren't as interested in this collab is because it's so disconnected from the forum. I mean there wasn't a whole lot of communication in the other threads but I could see it progressing on the forum which I'm already visiting every day and there's a sort of drive to reserve a tile when you can see them being taken. The only way I can see this being the same for Tzigla is if I had bookmarked it and were visiting it regularly but I'm not so interested in the collab that I would do that. The other thing I was thinking was that this is the Tzigla thread not the pixelation tile collab thread, so I come in here expecting talk about Tzigla rather than the collab, which again isn't particularly interesting to me so I don't read the thread, and without having the collab on my mind I probably won't be itching to participate.

I can't really say how to solve this but by taking out the human/community element the whole thing just seems less interesting.

Edit: Maybe a postbot or something which could post the comment box activity in the forum. Just a thought.

[evilchelu]

Hey peeps!

Testing version deployed on staging! If all goes well, tomorrow we'll deploy on live. There are some crazy internal changes so please help us test it.

http://staging.tzigla.com

Changes in this deploy:

* thumbnails are generated when the admin approves a tile
* much nicer homepage (dedication to gizmo)
* signing in/out redirects back to the exact location you were viewing
* smaller sharing buttons
* automatically removing color profiles from tiles
* done tiles are now the exact size (since we're now removing the extra uploaded margins)
* a lot of invisible code changes that were needed so we can generate the thumbs because of stupid standards

Coming soon (most likely tomorrow):

* jump to board selector
* save full image as png/jpg
* tiles instead of activity stream when selecting an artist
* more

[Mathias]

Cool, a redesign!

K, so far I see only the homepage altered, so commenting only on it . . .


I design do sites, so some things come to mind. Earlier you said you guys are somewhat disadvantaged because you're not designers. So, let's see. . .

-Complete lack of flair. Bland. It's all grey. On one hand I like that it's neutral because it by default channels focus to the crazy colorful collabs, but on the other - a dull site is a dull site. This site is host to intense creativity but it's design seems to think it hosts resources for accountants to prepare tax returns. It's design style is tasteful, not having that dreaded novice vibe to it, but there's so much room for improvement!

-A strong bold masthead graphic is mandatory here. I'd do it personally if you wanted to do that. It needs to match the style of the site too, of course. And yes I'm going to boldly assert that Tzigla needs a REAL logo now. The current one is . . . yeah. Nobody likes it when I tell them their branding sucks, but if thing is going to take off it needs something better to do it with.

-The 765 content width oughta be updated to 990px, which is the modern fixed width. Your 765 width accommodates the old most-common resolution of 800x600. Target 1024x768 instead, as a minimum. 800 is obselete. Making things handheld/phone compliant is not my specialty so I don't know much about that. Giving it a fatter width will make for less vertical scrolling and give it a more contemporary feel. Remember, you're trying to attract users.

-Homepage, as I see it, is divided into 4 distinctive parts - Masthead,  Featured board/News,  Current WIP boards,  and General info, at bottom. Yet, they're all just kinda lumped together into the same grey column; not much visual priority going on. Highly functional, yes. But, not very compelling. Create some distinction. I see a much different looking site in my head for Tzigla. With an actual color scheme. I suggest a mega footer for the general info region.


-And while there is a need to promote and get users, it would be best if all the dust is settled before this thing is really trafficked hard, so that when people discover it they see the true shining wonderful attractive Tzigla. One good thing about the Tzigla name is that is searches really well. Very easy to find if searched, since such a unique word.

I want this thing to take off, just like you do. Above are some things, based on my experience, that I think may greatly improve Tzigla.

[evilchelu]

Hola again pixies

Deployed a new version on staging. We're leaving it only on staging for now so we can test things some more.

Current known bug: as admin, updating of thumbnails for the board doesn't work in opera. use safari, chrome or ff for now.

http://staging.tzigla.com

So, instead of the board selector, save full image and tiles instead of activity stream for artists we did some completely different things

* major thing for admins when sending back tiles!
  * admin can send a PM on tzigla
  * the artist can now see what the admin saw when it was sent back
  * this is very cool and important because the admin no longer has to send a message on facebook, twitter or pixelation, and the admin also doesn't have to manually make a screenshot anymore, wee
* option to allow max N tiles per artist per board
* we also nuke the transparency away from uploaded tiles

[evilchelu]

Again, thanks Mathias for the ideas and for being the only one that actually looked at the staging server ...sigh

re: 765 content width: It's actually because the ipad is 1024x768 so this would fit just fine in a portrait ipad. And we wanted to escape having to design a special one just for that in the future

re: bland and boring design: Of course, we totally agree. However, as developers, the only way to have something that doesn't look totally crap is to use as few colors as possible . Therefore, dark and the occasional yellowish highlights have resulted. Also, there was a lot of work put into thinking about UX instead of design we couldn't have done anyway.

We'd obviously love to have a design, a logo, some identity and consistency. But, that's a ton of work for a designer, and also a ton of work for us to coordinate with said designer and maybe to implement some quite big changes. Not to mention paying said designer. We've already kinda invested about $40k in development time on tzigla without any  plan to get that back. So, theoretically, it should be a no brainer to pay a designer, but invested money through spent time seems cheaper than invested real money, for some reason.

re: waiting to get it really nice before looking for users: Totally disagree! Perfect is the enemy of good.

We've launched tzigla to the forum after about 50 hours of work or so. We're now probably at 5-600 hours of work. We would have never, ever worked that much without feedback and/or some sense of motion. Not to mention it would have been way worse than it is now.

So, regardless of how good it looks, having more users is way better than the very few users we have right now.

re: offer about design stuffs: awww! <3

Please hit me up on gtalk/jabber IM. I'm evil@che.lu

[evilchelu]

Somebody make a youtube video of quack quack coming together and write a blog post or 3 about it quick!  That should stir up some attention.  I would, except that I don't have a blog and I'm up to my chin in travel plans.

Actually, now that we have the event stream we're planning on adding board playback in the browser and also maybe automatically generating movies and uploading them to youtube. Baby steps

[evilchelu]

I think the reason I and possibly other people aren't as interested in this collab is because it's so disconnected from the forum. I mean there wasn't a whole lot of communication in the other threads but I could see it progressing on the forum which I'm already visiting every day and there's a sort of drive to reserve a tile when you can see them being taken. The only way I can see this being the same for Tzigla is if I had bookmarked it and were visiting it regularly but I'm not so interested in the collab that I would do that. The other thing I was thinking was that this is the Tzigla thread not the pixelation tile collab thread, so I come in here expecting talk about Tzigla rather than the collab, which again isn't particularly interesting to me so I don't read the thread, and without having the collab on my mind I probably won't be itching to participate.

I can't really say how to solve this but by taking out the human/community element the whole thing just seems less interesting.

Edit: Maybe a postbot or something which could post the comment box activity in the forum. Just a thought.

As with most new things, some adaptation is needed.

We could do a tziglabot that would post the activity from tzigla to a special thread. The bot could even impersonate the user that did the action/posted the comment.

However, it's more custom work for what appears to be just lack of interest, or maybe people are overly busy. So, I'm personally not convinced that that would stir up much more activity. I'll have  a look at implementing this tho, and if it doesn't take too much time, I might even do it. But, again, it seems kinda odd to invest time in this when there is hardly any activity on the pix board .

[Commander Gizmo]

I also looked at the staging area.  I was preparing a response with some demo images but, as it turns out, Mathias's post covered it much better anyway.  I completely concur with Mathias's first 4 points.  I can see pros and cons to getting a larger user base now vs later.

Chelu, Mathias is right.  You need more flair and pop to your site so it feels fun instead of drab.  It needs to add energy to the project and motivate your users.  It does none of those things right now.  If someone is told about it or finds it on google, they are probably not going to look around very long before they form their first impression of dullness.  Inaccurate or not, they'll never learn the truth if they aren't motivated to stick around.

32 makes a good point as well, even if he can't pick a good forum name.  You would likely get a great deal more response from the forum communities you are connected with if there wasn't such a huge distinction between the community and your site.  There are lots of ways that have been used in the past to close this gap, and there are probably plenty of new and innovative ways as well.  A few suggestions after a quick brainstorm:

• Theme Matching
  You could set up your site to allow for multiple themes which, with your partner site's permission, closely follow that of the partner site.  This would make the transition very seamless, but obviously has many challenges and a ton of work is involved.
• Postmortem
  You might start a thread with the idea of reviewing what was liked or disliked about quack quack, your only completed board.  You could also invite comments on the artwork itself.
• Board Specific Threads
  You could start a partner site thread for each board you start on your site, or at least the boards you think they'd be interested in.  Having discussion within the community about a board in progress spreads awareness, encourages community interest, and helps greatly to knit the partner site and your site together into one community.  It may also demonstrate what progress is occurring, thus driving further progress.  Having only this thread about the inner workings and theory behind your site doesn't really perform any of those tasks.
• Ask Them
  Why not start a thread asking the community what they want to work on?  Perhaps the right type of board will generate more response.  The folks here might prefer a particular palette or theme for example.  I realize that is what this thread is kinda for, but it can be intimidating for someone to make a suggestions about what type of board they want when there is so much backend and UI discussion going on.

Welcome to the World Wide Web
Unfortunately, the truth is that making a cool site that attracts tons of users on it's own is very rare and usually takes a very long time.  Strong communities on the net don't usually just happen on their own.  Now that you are a webmaster, you need to be a salesman for your site.  You have to network (good start with the partner sites!), create buzz, and generally spread the word.  Since you have chosen such an unusual and unique name for your site, you have some extra work to do to get the name out there.  Is your site using search engine optimizations (SEO), and is it linked to from any blogs, news outlets, or youtube?  Who knows about it, and who do you want to know about it?  You may consider searching out some of the larger artist enclaves round the 'net and approaching them to become partner sites.  The bottom line is a cold hard fact: Someone has to take time away from development to build the community.  And unless you can find someone else to do it, that someone is you.

[evilchelu]

Thanks gizmo for the suggestions. We really appreciate that you and Mathias care about tzigla to post so many suggestions

We're painfully aware that tzigla doesn't have a cool design. Unfortunatelly, as I replied to Mathias, that's kinda the best we can do. It has however seriously improved since the beginning, I guess .

The problem with communities is that they don't really want to make the work to integrate with tzigla, and even if they would, they don't have the people to code the really tiny bits that glue it (I did it myself for pixelation, btw, even tho I don't do php).

I'm assuming they're all afraid tzigla is going to steal their users and make millions off them or something. So, deeper integration with a huge number of forums isn't something people seem to be craving. The idea for tzigla was from the beginning that it has to revolve around existing communities and make their life easier, but it seems to go this way:

1. we don't know where these communities are exactly
2. if we get to them, maybe someone will post a tiny post about tzigla
3. they will love the idea
4. nobody will actually care about the integration or running a board

We really really want to have other people be admins, but the communities don't seem to want or trust tzigla. When I'm really sad about this I'm thinking it's because it's completely free and so I assume they all think "there MUST BE something wrong with this, why would anyone do it for free" or "nice, but then all our users and ad revenue will go away". I don't even want to begin to think how sad it would be that if this were actually true (for them, because they have such a low expectation of the world).

About your specific suggestions

re: theme matching: Even if it would be seamless, someone has to do the work. Then we have to keep up with supporting themes, making sure they still work when we change stuff, etc. However I think this would just feel a bit like uncanny valley since we'll never actually be integrated without quite a bit of work from the partner site as well.

re: postportem: You mean go around on art boards and post the quack board and ask for opinions? For some reason I'd feel a bit sleazy. I'd rather go and just tell them about tzigla, not try to sneak in. But maybe I understood wrong what you suggest

re: board specific threads: Where would I post all the other 5 boards we have now? There's no other community part of tzigla right now. And pixelation wouldn't have been either if ptoing wouldn't have been so believing in us. He really wanted this to happen. Most people you have to chase around and still they don't care. Again, I'm assuming that since it's free, most people instinctively associate free with zero value and don't invest much real thought in it. As I replied to 32, I could theoretically do a tziglabot for pixelation that could impersonate users and post your tzigla activity in a special thread. But, why? There is almost no activity on that board so what would that help.

Then, as I was saying, other forums I've contacted like the tzigla idea, but they're not even going through the work to implement signins, which is about 15 lines of code. I'm positive they won't go through the process of implementing securely posting as the user from tzigla, which is more complicated work.

re: ask them: Ask who? On pixelation? Of course people would want different shaped boards, hex boards, iso boards, tetris boards, rotated boards and all sorts of other cool ideas. But it's very easy to want, then it's even easier to not to put in the work. Based on historical evidence, I strongly believe it's not the lack of an exact board type that's keeping people from participating (for example: lots of people asked and lots were convinced that activity and commenting would help; yet it's clear they didn't)

re: welcome to the www I'm totally aware of that. I think I've proved that I didn't expect this to be an overnight hit and I'm putting in the work to back it up.

Starting up, we didn't even consider wanting to have a tzigla community. We wanted to have tzigla help existing communities. But maybe that's a bad plan. Maybe tzigla should be parallel and completely separated and not even try to integrate, since existing communities seem afraid to get too close to tzigla.

Let me tell you what we tried already.

We've tried to create buzz and spread the word. It worked! But within our circle of influence, which is developers and programmers.

We've posted a question to hacker news and it made the front page for about 4 hours. In that day we had about 200 unique visitors from there, and about 3000 unique visitors because people posted on twitter. The result was about 15-20 people reserving on the sandbox and then abandoning tiles, and 4 people actually have made a tile on the newbies board.

I've also posted to a deviantart forum section, I'm not really sure it was the correct one. Zero visitors came from there, so I'm assuming that nobody reads that section, but pimping your project in another category I think is not allowed so, meh. We'll be making a deviantart tzigla account to post the collabs there, but we kinda need to finish some collabs first, heh.

We've contacted the pixeljoint people over a month ago. Admins said they love it and want to do something with it. I've sent them really really clear details about how to implement auth so that their users have their logo on tzigla next to their name, etc, same as pixelation. Everything went silent.

We've found the iCE facebook page (from tiles.ice.org fame) and dropped a link there. After a few weeks, somebody noticed it and said, "nice!", we should redo tiles.ice.org again. Then they went silent. Except a guy who decided to post a link to his own site even tho he doesn't care to update it anymore.

I've personally contacted the original author of the original tiles.ice.org. He was so excited about tzigla, then there was silence.

I've found the #ice irc channel, some people loved the idea. But then silence.

Plans for the future

1. Make a tzigla account on deviantart and post about the collabs - probably with screenshots at 25, 50, 75, and 100%. Unfortunatelly, the tzigla name is taken and unused and I can't reach the owner so he can transfer us the username, sigh.
2. Make a tzigla youtube account - post videos of board, but we need boards
3. Start emailing again all those people that i've already contacted.
4. Actually find people who would write about tzigla. Lots of people seem to love it, they post on twitter, nobody posts on facebook, nobody seems to have a blog. Also, as I said in the hacker news thread, the artist type people don't share, and I don't know where all these art forums that would be insterested are. Our active users don't seem to like tzigla enough to spread the word either. Also, once something gets to some sort of community where designer type people hang around, nobody cares anyway, most likely because of all the "not really part of our site" issues from above.

What people who love tzigla can do

Help us find moderators, preferably moderators that come with a community attached

Also, tomorrow morning we'll deploy the new version on the live server and we'll start again to find people to tell about tzigla and try to get more users.

So, if by any chance you want to spread the word, please wait till tomorrow!

Conclusion

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to make it clear that it's hard for us to spread the word to artist communities because we don't have any artist friends. And it always comes across as a genuine recommendation if someone that's already part of the community makes the offer instead of the site's authors. So, if people that love the site don't spread the word, we're kinda swimming against a strong current.

Hugs y'all!

[evilchelu]

Yay! New version deployed on live!

http://tzigla.com

Changes since last deploy on live:

* thumbnails are generated when the admin approves a tile
* much nicer homepage (dedication to gizmo)
* signing in/out redirects back to the exact location you were viewing
* smaller sharing buttons
* automatically removing color profiles from tiles
* done tiles are now the exact size (since we're now removing the extra uploaded margins)
* a lot of invisible code changes that were needed so we can generate the thumbs because of stupid standards

* major thing for admins when sending back tiles!
  * admin can send a PM on tzigla
  * the artist can now see what the admin saw when it was sent back
  * this is very cool and important because the admin no longer has to send a message on facebook, twitter or pixelation, and the admin also doesn't have to manually make a screenshot anymore, wee
* option to allow max N tiles per artist per board
* we also nuke the transparency away from uploaded tiles

* feedback form

[evilchelu]

Hola again!

Shiny new version deployed! Thank dira for the code, cos I didn't do anything for this release.

http://tzigla.com

Changes:

* PLAYBACK!!
  * only for complete boards and for boards where the borders are being shown (only the checker collab c64, that is)
  * http://tzigla.com/boards/1
  * http://tzigla.com/boards/3
* better small-thumbnail generation for opera
* admins can now hover a tile they have to approve to see what margins this tile will leave for others

Huggies!

[Mathias]

We appreciate the long explanation there, chelu. And the upgrades are nice!

I want to make some more tiles in the coming week. Been having trouble buckling down; stuff going on over here. Poor 1-3 is probably feelin' pretty dejected. I better paint her up real nice to make up for it.

@ both of you, Dira & chelu, keep up the awesome work!!!

[evilchelu]

Hello peeps,

We want to announce a potentially confusing change we will be adding to tzigla in the next days. A license!

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This is the same thing that wikipedia uses, and also lots of people on flickr choose to use.

The main goal of the license is to make sure proper attribution is given to the artists, and to tzigla, when people post a picture of the whole board or tile. It also allows anyone to take the tiles and make a better visualization or form of art with them and makes sure the tiles are not "locked" into tzigla.

Here are some reasons why we're adding this license and what we want people to do with it:

* if someone posts a picture to their blog, we want them to put a link back to the board or tile
* with or without a license, people will make a screenshot of the board, and try to sell posters (this happened to the tiles.ice.org boards)
  * people will do this anyway, but if we have a clear and simple license, they will at least put a link back to the board on tzigla
* we love to work on tzigla, and we want people not to take advantage of our work
* we want to encourage others to create even nicer things from the boards in tzigla. some examples:
  * nicer visualizations of a board being revealed (we have a play button, but a person with video editing skills could make a much better one)
  * calculations and computations based on the tiles. concrete examples: number of colors used, percent of red in a board, average number of attempts for a tile, etc

We hope you agree with us and we'd love to hear any opinions or advice regarding this.

Thanks!

[dira]

For those wondering about the state of the Pixelation collab, it's coming together very very nice. Can't wait to see it fully revealed!  

There are only a few tiles left, so you should grab one and show your pixel power while there is still time:

[Argyle]

Finally got some closure on my curiosity about the name you chose for Tzigla.  In romanian it means "Roof Tile" - did Google inform me properly?


Revelation: Oh hey, these two separate boards are collaborating together to form a single image that looks like the work of iLKke

[evilchelu]

Hey pixel people!

We've just deployed a quite nice version of tzigla, if I do say so myself. Check it out here:

http://tzigla.com

Sweet changes included:

* quick board navigation (we're trying to score major points with gizmo since we're implementing all his suggestions)
* you can now set a title for your done tiles (titles become visible when the tile becomes visible)
  * example (first tile ever on tzigla, first one with a title): http://tzigla.com/boards/1#!/tiles/1-3
* artist profile which shows all tiles across all boards: http://tzigla.com/profile
* account editing where you should set an email for notifications NOW: http://tzigla.com/account
* random board on homepage
* cc-by-sa license
* lots of bugfixes and nice ui stuffs

Enjoy!

[evilchelu]

Finally got some closure on my curiosity about the name you chose for Tzigla.  In romanian it means "Roof Tile" - did Google inform me properly?

You are most correct. The generic word for tile is dala, but it sucks

[evilchelu]

In other related news: The Checker Collab C64 board only has 11 tiles available!!

http://tzigla.com/boards/3

It's gonna be epic when it's done and I'm sure you're gonna be rather bummed if you don't get at least a tile in

[Mathias]

Keeps getting better and better. Fantastic work you guys.

Yeah I can't wait to see the slick C64 board done.

[Grinner]

I'd love to participate in this, but only recently have I really gotten into pixel art, and I'm not that good. I know it's no competition or anything, but I just don't want to epicly fail on my first go, but I'll definitely try to get a tile in!

Also, I really like the site, great layout and concept and everything, I'd gladly reccomend it to some of my artsy friends. Also, a good place to spread the word for the site would be Conceptart.org, but I'm sure you already know about that

[evilchelu]

@grinner: no dude, we had no idea about conceptart.org and we generally have no idea about lots of places where we could pimp tzigla.

If anyone is active on another forum, some pimping would be greatly appreciated

[Mathias]

Sujjerschun: toss in a link to the Tzigla homepage in the top-left dropdown collab selector. Current link to Tzigla homepage too obscure and it's not always there.

[Argyle]

Sujjerschun

I had to google that just to have google ask me if I meant "suggestion" before I made the connection. Robots are the only ones that can read your strange hybrid german gobbledygook.

(also I second that notion, I can not find the homepage link unless I use my bookmark)

[dira]

It will come in the next deploy.

[evilchelu]

Hallo!

As with most recent deploys, most of the code in this one was actually made by dira.

We've just deployed a new version to the staging server. As always, any help finding bugs is appreciated. Tomorrow we'll deploy on live.

http://staging.tzigla.com

Changes in this version:

* PIXEL EDITOR!!!!11oneoneeleven
  * uses the board's palette
  * 4x, 2x, 1x views - all drawable
  * shortcut keys: cycle colors, cycle brushes, right or shift click to pick color
  * undo/redo - 100 history states
  * saves as draft in your browser after each stroke (so if your browser crashes or you're on ios, you don't lose any work)
  * saves as draft on the server when you close the editor
  * please let us know how you feel about the editor and if something really important is missing

* iphone/ipad compatibility (nothing special, but at least it can be used now)
  * pixel editor is touch compatible!
* email notifications when your tile is moderated (if you have added an email to your account)
* db optimizations

Huggies!

[Argyle]

Holy cow, epic addition guys!  Seems like it would make the collaboration more accessible if there was a pixel board not geared at higher-end pixelers, like this community, who wouldn't know how to or would not be comfortable with doing it in their own editors.  For people doing it on computers not of their own or, like you mentioned, people on iPhones and whatnot, it sounds pretty cool!  Will have to see if my DSi using Opera will be able to handle it.  Probably not since it has like useless amounts of available memory to save undo and image data history, not to mention all the other gooby issues - but would be interesting to at least try! Will let you know.

One quick note - the cycle colors and cycle brushes shortcuts are mis-labeled or mis-bound.

It says:

cycle colors: q, w
cycle brushes: a, s

But what is actually happening when I use it is:

cycle brushes: q, w
cycle colors: a, s

[evilchelu]

@argyle: Yay! You poked at the app. Thanks!

Thanks for the bug report... fixed.

re: boards Yes, we'll have a newbie pixel board and most likely a newbie sandox board. And for the pixel sandbox we might even make registration optional to get more people interested.

re: opera mobile Definitely won't work. It only works on webkit/safari based browsers because the mobile version is practically the exact one from the desktop, so it needs a very good browser. And, we don't actually own any devices, and we've just tested with the ios simulator

re: editor Would relly love to know how you feel about the brushes, if there are any other you might need, etc. At the current feature set, I think it's actually usable even for pro people like you so do tell if something really important seems to be missing. If not, tell us why you won't use it.

/we hugs Argyle

[Argyle]

One thing I notice being a bit of a turn-off for me is not seeing a real-time display of what the pixels I'm about to place will look like snapped to the pixel grid before I even click the mouse.  Sort of like my pointer will still hover smoothly, but the brush icon/display would snap only to absolute integers.  No idea how to word it, haha.  Graphics Gale, ProMotion, and Grafx2 behave in the way I am trying to convey if you have access to any of those for a better idea. This does not render the applet useless to me, but it is something I have grown to be accustomed to from my favored editors.

Another thing that would be very handy would be a line tool of some sort at the very least.  It would be very necessary to have a real-time representation of what the drawn line will look like before you let off the mouse button, though. Oval and Rectangle tools, whether outline or filled, would also be good basic features nearly all editors come with that are useful for blocking in initial concepts.

Maybe a flood fill/paint bucket tool?

It is entirely usable to get the necessities down of the raw pixel goodness - pixel art's nice in that it's easy to do with simple tools.  But we are creatures of comfort, after all, and some editors have all the padding of their tools and other features that make them VERY comfortable to the point that you don't notice until you try to lie in a different bed

{late edit} Checked it out on my old Mac running OSX 10.4.11 using both Firefox 3.6.13 and Safari 3.0.4 (523.12) - Results were that I could not even see the brush patterns until I was clicking to draw when I selected one within Firefox. On my systems running Windows, though, I WAS able to see the brush cursor in the shape selected.

Within Safari I could not, for whatever reason, get any of the boards to load the actual tile section of the different boards - just the creative commons message, the comment box (only the field you type in to leave one) and the header with the log-in info. This Safari problem I was getting with the live server version of the site as well.  Might be something on my end?

[evilchelu]

Hey, quick update. Still on staging.

http://staging.tzigla.com/boards/3

PIXEL EDITOR IS KICKING ASS WITH BRUSH PREVIEW, DITHER MODES AND FILL

ZOMG!!!

Also, you might not care, but the whole editor has been refactored inside

[evilchelu]

@argyle for the record, we only support pretty recent browsers

Partly because we use some high tech stuff and partly because we don't have time to fix everything.

Therefore:

* Safari 5
* Chrome - no clue what version, but a relatively recent one (I have 9, for example)
* Opera 10.6 and Opera 11
* Firefox 3.6 (4 works but the betas have random broken stuff, so ymmv)

[Argyle]

Haha, k.  I haven't used the mac I was checking that on for a long time, my wife just uses it to check facebook when we're in the living room using firefox, so I figured it was a pretty old build of Safari.  Will have to take a look at the new editor though, good deal!

[evilchelu]

Another version deployed on staging.

http://staging.tzigla.com/boards/3

Changes:

* clear canvas button
* permanent remembering of sign in
* custom cursor (except opera/ff3 which suck).
* crazy optimization (especially on ipad)

[Argyle]

Just noticed this, and it might have been that I didn't see it before because there were only 4 items in the shortcuts list and I know there are more now (checked it the first time from a larger resolution display) - check the bottom right of the screenshot, anything below the first few items on the list of shortcuts gets cut off.  My laptop's display resolution is 1366x768 so that's as big as I am able to make my window without hiding my tab bar and bookmarks bar.  You've disabled scrolling capabilities purposefully I take it? Perhaps if you made the shortcuts in a scrollable list?  Or a rollover link similar to how the quick-board-selector list works in the top left of the header? Wouldn't want people not noticing the commands or assuming the capabilities weren't available.

[evilchelu]

OHAI!

Deployed yet another version on staging.

http://staging.tzigla.com/boards/3

Changes:

* editor fits better on short screens
* editor fits better on tall screens
* zoom buttons
* some ipad specific tweaks

Hopefully, tomorrow morning we'll finally deploy this bad boy on the live server!

[evilchelu]

Hey hey hey! 

Deployed kick ass editor and stuff on live!

http://tzigla.com

Recapping all changes for people who missed them:

* PIXEL EDITOR!!!!11oneoneeleven
  * uses the board's palette
  * HUGE zooms
  * ordered dithering modes: 25%, 50%, 75%
  * undo/redo - 100 history states
  * shortcut keys: cycle colors, cycle brushes, cycle dithers, undo/redo, right click to pick color, shift click to fill
  * saves as draft in your browser after each stroke
  * saves as draft on the server when you close the editor
  * works on ipad in landscape mode. doesn't work on iphone because it's too slow

* permanent sign in
* email notifications when your tile is moderated (if you have added an email to your account)
* google auth
* db optimizations

Huggies