Cinemasphyxia.com - August News

[Nyghtfall]

Hello everyone. I am terribly sorry for the continued delay, but I finally solved the problem with my editor not saving files in WMV format. Basically, its AppData folder was corrupt.

I'm also sorry to do this, but I'm switching back to 720 x 480 WMV. After performing a few tests on some of my older, longer clips, the file sizes on the resulting MP4's were enormous. When I checked the combined file sizes on the first few MP4's I posted on 7/21, I discovered they already total 1.43 GB. The other 700+ MPEG-1's and WMV's in my collection total just 8.14 GB. While my hosting service offers unlimited storage, my PC doesn't, and I'm sure your's doesn't, either. Therefore, I believe going back to WMV is the best move. The next update will mark the return to that format, at which point I'll also replace the MP4's I posted on 7/21 with re-edited WMV's.

With that in mind, I've got three new clips ready to post. Unfortunately, I've run into a snag with my FTP server. I've no idea what happened, but since Tuesday morning, my upload speeds have barely averaged 10 KiB/s, which is horrendously slow compared to the 5 Mb/s I pay for with my cable provider. I opened a ticket with my hosting service yesterday afternoon, but won't be posting anything more until the issue is resolved. Meanwhile, as part of routine maintenance, I'm going through the entire site to adjust page layouts and modify the link menus, and will continue editing more clips so I'll have enough content ready to make up for the delay.

Thank you for your time and patience.

[Nyghtfall]

My hosting service has been unable to duplicate the problem I'm having with slow FTP upload speeds, but they did notice my site is in an old datacenter. They're going to move me to a new one and see if that resolves the problem. There may be some down time during the move, so if you can't access the site, that's why.

[Nyghtfall]

My hosting service has moved me to a new data center, and my upload speeds are back! Woohoo!

Since we're about to start the last week of August, I'm going to wait until September 1 to resume updates again, at which point I'll have five new clips ready to make up for the delay, along with several re-edits of older clips that I'm upgrading to 720 x 480 WMV.

In other news, last June I announced I was redesigning the layouts for all of the clip pages with a goal to be done by the site's 14th anniversary in October. I decided to take advantage of the down time by getting as much of that project done as possible, and am happy to report that I've completed the Drowning, Hanging, and Suffocation indices. All 267 clip pages now share the same, much more well-designed, easier-to-read layout. I saved the Strangling index for last. It has another 337 clip pages I get to tackle. I've also re-structured the link menus to make them more uniform across the entire site, including the clip pages.

Finally, it recently occurred to me that I may have members who are color blind. While I've never received any such feedback, I've proactively modified the symbol key for the indices. Now, instead of two different colored asterisks indicating what type of clip is associated with a given title, I have a red asterisk to identify titles that were upgraded to 640 x 480 WMV, and a lime green plus sign identifying clips that have since been upgraded to 720 x 480 WMV. I've also modified the CSS file that controls the overall appearance of text to underline links when you mouse over them.

Here's a screenshot of the new layout for the clip pages:



And a screenshot of the symbol change for the category indices:




All of these changes will go live on September 1. See ya then!