Art, Technology & People

The Google Nightmare – Errors or has P2L been Penalized?

July 5, 2006 Dan Richard Comments 8 comments

A few days ago I noticed that my revenue and clicks have plummeted on pixel2life.com and I started to panic. I open up awstats and sure enough, traffic is down an average of 5000 visitors a day since last Thursday. I do a bit more digging and find out that almost ALL of my Google traffic has come to a grinding halt. I’ve gone from 5000 visitors a day from Google to less than 300! Can we say “nightmare”!? I have been pounding away at Google’s various helpdesk contacts, and so far, no dice.

I have TONS of pages listed, but I did a search for www.pixel2life.com on google.com and I get the following:

“Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.pixel2life.com”

This can be seen at HERE.

If I search simply pixel2life the search results don’t even show pixel2life.com in the search results. I used to be the first result. Check it out HERE.

I have also completely dropped on all keyword searches that I normally placed high on.

So far, I have received absolutely nothing from Google on this, and calling their corporate office was completely useless because there is no phone support for free services. At this point, it looks like I’ve been penalized. I then run over to Sitepoint and the entire Google forum is FULL of the same or similar complaints like mine and apparently there is a technical glitch.

Either way, I’m kind of freaking out over this because I’m losing revenue and traffic big time. This had better get fixed soon or I’m in serious doo doo 🙁

Dan

Photography Contest, Hammertime and General Update

June 26, 2006 Dan Richard Comments 1 comment

Hello everyone!

My apologies for the lack of posts on the Journal lately, but it’s been quite busy here in the land of P2L with various projects in the works and some fun stuff happening in the community. First off, our first summer contest was announced a couple of weeks ago and it’s been a real hit, with TONS of entries! Canen Art is the host of our first ever photo contest, and they donated some awesome prizes, including a professionally mounted print for their studio. You can get all the details for this contest HERE. The contest closes at the end of the week, so hurry and get your submissions in ASAP!

Has a little “media mention” recently in the Sunday Start Ledger published June 25th that I am trying to get a copy of… if anyone can grab this for me and scan it, I’d really appreciate it. In the meantime, it was also on their online article on HERE.

Hammertime is still going as always, but has recently really started to take shape and it’s finally starting to look like a website of some sort! NGPixel and Chaos King have been working quite hard on this, and with final exams out of the way, we’ve been able to pick up the pace to finish up. I’m hoping to wrap up in a couple of weeks, but I can’t promise a final date as yet because there’s just too many loose ends that need to be tied up. Either way, it’ll looking great and I’m sure you guys are going to LOVE this project. Keep your eye on the main site news at Pixel2life for more updates on the release.

Aside from that, I am gearing up to get back into freelance projects once v3 is out, so if you have some large scale web projects you want to bring to life, you’ll be able to have the crew from P2L at your service in the non-too-distant future! More to come on our professional services later this summer.

That’s about it from my end… Hammertime and P2L maintenance is my life atm!

Take care!
Dan

Sign up required to post comments due to Spam

June 11, 2006 Dan Richard Comments 11 comments

Hey all,

Due to the crazy about of comment spamming from porn and drug bots, I have set my journal to sign up required for anyone that wants to leave a comment. My apologies for the inconvenience, but I’m tired of cleaning out 100 spam comments a day. You can sign up HERE.

Thanks,
Dan

Summer Contests Have Begun! We start with our first ever Photo Competition!

June 9, 2006 Dan Richard Comments 3 comments

It is my pleasure to announce our first ever Photography Competition, presented by Pixel2life Studios and Canen Art! Canen Art is the photography shop of our very own staff member Jason, who is a professional photographer specializing in breath taking scenery and wildlife photography. His site allows you to download quality wallpapers, stock shots and prints and is constantly being updated with his latest work, which never fails to impress.

Jason has been extremely generous and donated some sweet prizes for this contest, which of course will be photography oriented. Get all the details at the Contest Announcement post!

Good luck to everyone who enters!

Dan

3D Text in Corel Photopaint – Create a 3D Text or Object Effect without a 3D App!

June 1, 2006 Dan Richard Comments 6 comments

We’ve probably all seen how to perform a basic 3D text or object effect in Photoshop tutorials, but I recently received an email from a P2L user who wanted to know how exactly this would be pulled off in Photopaint. It’s actually the exact same process, but of course, I added a few embellishments. The basic principal behind this tutorial is simple… create some text, then just copy/paste it in about 10 layers under the main text and move each layer 1 pixel vertically and horizontally from the one above it to create the 3D look. It’s a popular effect, and it’s very easy to do… we’ll jazz it up with some gradients just to go the extra mile.

In the end, we’ll up with this 3D text:

Bear in mind, this doesn’t just apply to text… you can do this for any object that has an initial 2D appearance. We’ll complete this tutorial assuming you know how to use the Interactive Object Transparency Tool, alter Brightness and Contrast and a few other basic tools. If you’re not sure how to use these tools, please read some of my older tutorials that cover these items in more detail.

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