Artcrossing news, September 2012

Hey guys, I'm back Sorry for the delay. Thank you to everyone who followed the instructions and did not ask for profiles in the meantime. Here's some updates and group news.

Artcrossing in the news

SolutionsSanctuary does (amongst other things) features of interesting community projects. They covered us in August and ValaSedai wrote a great description of who we are and what we do. I also found it quite interesting hearing what Artcrossing means to different people as well.

Read the article here.

August contest

The August contest will be announced very soon - I'm just waiting for a few latecomers to give them the chance to submit their gifts to the gallery.

But in the meantime...

Prizes so far:
- beaded lizard charm from Searaph
- small set of cards and envelopes from Pepper-dragon
- feature from art-of-amie
- 420 points (split between winners) (full details of donors in contest journal)

As you can see we have plenty of points but only two art prizes and one feature! Can anyone donate some more gifts or features?

Did you move house recently?

Okay, we ran into a bit of a problem recently.

When I started this up, I kept all the member info in the admin area, which was fine. But as the group got bigger (and profiles got longer too!) it got too big to keep it all there. I made several boxes to keep it in as there's a 64k limit per custom box, but it turns out there's some sort of bug where if you are very close to the 64k limit it doesn't save correctly (if you're over it, you just get told you're over it, but if you're near it, it doesn't save right). So some information was lost at one point.

We have managed to rectify it and I think we've caught everything (and we've moved the member info to a private Google document, which is a much better way of storing things), but just in case, I would like everyone who has moved house in the last six months to comment below.

Preferably, to comment with your current zipcode or some feature of your current address that CHANGED when you moved house. For example, if you moved from California to Florida, you can just say "I've moved to Florida" and assuming you've never had any other Florida address, if we have a Florida address for you we know we have the right one. If you didn't move very far and you still have the same zip code, you could give us the house number (e.g. "I moved from number 133 to number 28"). If you're not comfortable with doing any of that, then you can just say "I moved last month" and one of us'll send you a note.

Please do this in the comments as it will make it much faster for us to check what could potentially be a large number of people. Please do NOT send a note. Please also do not post your full address in the comments, because this is public and anyone can read it.

Profile requests

All right, I know you've all been waiting to hear this! We're now open for "send art" requests. Any member can send a request in now (no matter how new you are) but do be sensible and work out if you have enough time to make something first - I know this is "back to school" time for a lot of you and you might have other commitments.

Don't forget to check out this blog before you send in a note

Steampunk

A few people mentioned in the chat that they struggled with making steampunk gifts for people. Eldr-Fire has given us this informative article explaining just what steampunk is and a bit about its history. The final section even gives a little hint on how to get started with making something steampunk (I think it's aimed at costume makers but it could also apply to other kinds of crafts).