Category Archives: Meta

I’m taking the week of (United States) Thanksgiving off from work, and so I am also going to put the blog on hiatus once the contest results are up tomorrow. You may see some comics reviews from McKnight57, and I’ll still be putting up my 30 Characters Challenge entries, but nothing else except a daily Open Thread for anyone who wants to talk about whatever.

I’ll be back and at it next Monday, though. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

I’m in California all week for work, which is why posting has been slow and late. My apologies.

It looks like we are up, at least for the moment. Hooray! Only four days … Geez. I am really sorry for all the hassle, aggravation, and down time. This is certainly the longest and worst outage I’ve had in the five years or so I’ve been with DreamHost, but hopefully we’re here to stay for now. Let me know if there is any weirdness going forward. I apologize again.

To make up for it, here is Yoda versus a Balrog. Because I don’t know if you’re aware, but Disney just bought Lucasfilm and the “Star Wars” franchise for $4 billion, announcing that they will be releasing Episode VII in 2015.

As you could tell, the site had a lot of issues yesterday, and I sincerely apologize. Believe me, I am just as frustrated as you. DreamHost informed me that the hardware hosting HeroMachine.com (and lots of others) failed, and they had to move everything to a new machine. They are restoring everything from backup.

I am able to get on just fine now both as the WordPress admin and as a general visitor, so please let me know in this thread if you cannot or if there’s something missing.

In the future, you might also want to bookmark the HeroMachine Facebook page, as that’s where I post site status updates when it’s down.

I just added a new plugin for the HeroMachine Forums that will allow you to subscribe to a topic or even an entire forum so you get email notification whenever a new reply is added. You can either get individual notices, or a daily digest. Here’s where they appear:

Let me know if there are any problems with it!

Sorry guys, I’m having a rough day. No “You’re Going to Die” update today.

The HeroMachine Forums at UGO.com are now officially closed to new posts. They will remain up for the foreseeable future as a static repository for all of the awesome stuff that went on there over the years, but starting today no one will be able to add anything.

Instead, I would urge you to use the forums here at HeroMachine.com for all of your character-sharing, comics-discussing needs.

I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank WillyPete, the longtime moderator of the forums there. His service has always been the major determining factor in keeping those going as long as we did, and I can’t say enough how much I appreciate it. You are the man, WillyPete!

I just added a new sub forum called “How Do I …?” that’s meant to be a central location where people can go to get advice on how to create a given effect they want. For instance, I just got a question from someone on the best way to do stripes on a shirt, but I use the program so rarely I don’t really have a good answer.

So if you ever get stuck on a design and aren’t sure what to do, that’s your new home. Hopefully you pros will poke your heads in from time to time to answer the questions there as well.