Blog Resources

Shawn Woytowich — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:53:50 +0000

One thing I’ve learned about putting together a blog is that there are a lot of external services and resources available to help your blog become successful. There are so many in fact that it can seem a little overwhelming. The purpose of this article is to educate you on what’s available to you as a blogger and to create a centralized location that allows you quick access to those resources. Whether you’re new to the blog world such as I am or a veteran blogger, my hope is these blog resources will be of use to you. If you know of a great resource or tool that you think should be added here, by all means please comment and I’ll be sure to update the post.

Alexa
Alexa is a web traffic ranking website and is a great resource. Alexa tracks your web site’s popularity by calculating daily visitor’s and pageviews over a 3 month period. Having a lower traffic rank number is most beneficial. It is an essential blog resource tool if you are planning on advertising with your blog. The more traffic your website receives translates to the more chance an ad has of being seen and clicked on. It is also a good way of waging how relevant your blog’s subject matter fairs with keywords and searched terms.

BuySellAds
BuySellAds or BSA as commonly known, is a great blog resource for selling advertising spots on your website. It is a tool used by blog publishers and advertisers alike. Your blog and ad spots are ranked by traffic and the number of impressions your blog has to offer. Understandably, the more impressions your site can offer and the lower your traffic rank is (see Alexa), the more you potentially can charge for ad spots on your blog. However, even if your blog is generating a lot of traffic and impressions, you’ll want to stay competitive which many bloggers do by lowering their ad spot costs to attract potential advertisers.

Facebook
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last six years, you probably already know what Facebook is; A social network website. What you might not know however is that Facebook can be a great blog resource. If you don’t already have one, start a Facebook account and use it to drive traffic to your blog. Additionally, there are many Wordpress plugins available that allows your blog to interact with Facebook.

Flickr
Flickr is by far the best website for managing and displaying photographs, artwork, and images. It allows you to organize your images into albums and galleries. This is a great feature especially if you have a photography or art blog with a large amount of different imagery. As you may know, images can use up a lot of disk space and this is where Flickr comes to the rescue. Instead of eating up chunks of disk space within your own blog, use Flickr instead and have your blog link to those images. There are many Wordpress plugins that make this task simple and easy.

GMail
GMail is an online mail client brought to you by our good friends at Google. The good thing about GMail is that you can amalgamate all of your email addresses into one location. If you plan on having multiple email addresses on your blog, this is a great one-stop email tool to keep track of them all.

Google Analytics
An absolute must for any website! This online service from Google gives you valuable stats about your website and it’s traffic. It is so in-depth that is can even tell you what screen resolution your visitors use! It’s fairly simple to set up and easy to access when you want to see who’s visiting your blog. Analytics can take up to a week or so to pull the information it needs from your blog. I’d suggest applying for an account ASAP once your blog is ready to go live.

Google Webmaster Tools
Another great resource from Google, Webmaster Tools is a diagnostic tool for websites. It can analyze your blog and suggest ways of tweaking your HTML code, Meta Info, keywords and report on any errors such as duplication of content. Very handy for any blogger, new or old.

Gravatar
Lets face it, there are so many blogs, forums, and websites out there that require you to become a member before you can post messages and comments. Can you imagine having to fill out the forms with your information each and every time you hit a new one?! Gravatar, or “Globally Recognized Avatar”, allows to you to set up your profile / avatar once and for all. The next time you are asked to become a member or fill out a profile form, Gravatar will do it for you based on the profile you set up with Gravatar.

How does this help your blog? It can in two ways, the first is that you setup your blog to be Gravatar friendly for your visitors; trust me, they will be grateful. Next, use it as a traffic driving tool. How? The more blogs and forums you become a member on means the more opportunity you have to leave your signature after each comment or post. In that signature, put a link back to your blog. Make sure the blog or forum you’re posting on allows for links in your signature; most do.

PayPal
If you’re trying to drive traffic to your blog you’re probably doing it in hopes of selling some ad spots and making some money. Perhaps your blog content and theme represent some type of charity and you’re counting on donations for the cause. PayPal is the most globally recognized Internet money transfer / payment service. Many e-commerce websites use it, including eBay. If you don’t already have a PayPal account, it’s a good idea to set one up. Even if you don’t use it right away, it’ll be there for that first ad sale or donation!

Social Networks
Social Networks, there’s hundreds of them. Some are extremely popular like Facebook (this is why I gave it it’s own heading above) while others are still fairly new. Every social network website has something a little different to offer. They can drastically help your blog by becoming vehicles for traffic. I’m not saying that you should sign up for every one of them because quite frankly you won’t have time to blog if you did. What I am saying is try a few of the more popular ones out and see if you can use them to promote your blog. Some of these include: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, del.icio.uis.
For a more in-depth list of the available social networks, click the social network image above or click here.

YouTube
YouTube is a hugely popular website that allows you to upload and share videos. It has given many the average Joe their 15 minutes of fame. If this is your first time hearing of it, welcome to the Internet. Seriously though, it can be a great blog resource that is readily available to you. The same idea for disk space as mentioned in the Flickr section above can be applied here. Video, as you may know, takes up even more disk space than digital images. Use YouTube to upload your videos and then have your blog link to those videos. You’ll save a ton of disk space doing this. There’s many plugins available that can assist you with embedding YouTube videos right into your blog articles.

YouTube is also a social network in a way. The video descriptions you write on YouTube could include a link to your blog. This can bring in traffic from people who’ve never heard of your blog but managed to find your video on YouTube. Lets say your an artist running a blog but have no video. No problem! You can still make a video that is just a slide show of your portfolio or other interesting pieces you’ve created. This can potentially bring visitors to your blog because they like your work.

I hope this article has and will continue to be helpful for anyone who is interested in the blog world. Just to reiterate what I said in the opening paragraph, if you know of a helpful blog resource that’s not listed here, drop a comment in and help out a fellow blogger!

Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer

ReadySoft Inc. – A look back at my roots

Shawn Woytowich — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:49:08 +0000

I started out my design career as an artist in 1995 for a video game company called Readysoft Inc. The company was headed up by David Foster (no, not the musician), and had purchased the rights to an arcade classic called Dragon’s Lair. It was the first animated video game which was a huge hit in the early arcade scene. The game looked much like a cartoon (Illustrated by Don Bluth) in which you controlled the actions of the hero, Dirk the Daring. The original arcade version was stored on laser disc (the predecessor to CDs) which was hidden inside the arcade machine.
Readysoft took the original laser disc and converted it so that it could be played on the PC via CD-Rom. One of the problems with doing this was that “graphic artefacts” were left behind on each converted frame. This unwanted junk needed to be cleaned up for all the frames going into the game; and there were thousands of them.
Initially, I worked for Readysoft as a “Graphic Clean-Up Artist” where I was apart of a team responsible for cleaning up the individual frames that were to go into the PC version of the game. Dragon’s Lair was a huge success for Readysoft and the company eventually released Dragon’s Lair 2, Space Ace (another animated Don Bluth game), and Space Ace 2.

After some time, Readysoft took on the venture of creating their own animated game from scratch. A team of animators under the direction of David Quesnelle were hired to work on this new game, which would later be known as Brain Dead 13. It was during this time that the graphic clean-up department I worked in became dismantled and all focus went on the development of the new game. A friend of mine, Shawn Pascuttini, who worked with me in the department was also attending the animation courses at Sheridan College. Shawn became one of the animators who worked on Brain Dead 13. Though I worked in the graphic clean-up department, I had no formal training in art or design at the time. However, since I was pretty handy with computers and an opening came up in the Technical Supported department, I was moved there and kept my job at Readysoft.

A studio for the animators was set up at the Readysoft building and production of Brain Dead 13 began. Anyone who’s ever worked in animation will understand how time consuming a project like this can be. The entire department spent months developing and sketching the characters, painting background scenes, and scanning artwork frame-by-frame into the computer; which by the way were Amigas back then. The deadline for the release of the game was approaching fast and a lot overtime hours were already clocked. There was still a lot of frames that needed to be Cell-Painted and Mr. Quesnelle approached me for help. I spent many all-nighters painting frames for the game so we could meet our deadline. One of the coolest things I got to do on the project was painting the dramatic end scene in the game and my name shows up in the credits which is super cool!

In the end, the game did fairly well and for a short time I got to be apart of an animation team. When the project was over, the studio and department were dismantled and most of the animators, including my friend, went to Disney. That however wasn’t the end of Readysoft, or me for that matter.

Stay tuned for my next post on where Readysoft and I went after Braindead 13!

-Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer

A cleaned frame from the game Dragon`s Lair

A cleaned frame from the game Space Ace

A scene from Braindead 13

Here`s a YouTube video that someone put up that showcases some of the animation in Brain Dead 13.

Huge Tutorial Resource for Wacom Tablet

Shawn Woytowich — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:02:38 +0000

I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that I wanted to try painting some of my sketches with a tablet. Problem isI don’t own a tablet and have never used one. He was generous enough to let me borrow his. The tablet is a Wacom Graphire 4, a bit small but a great one for beginners like me who want to try it for cartooning. So now that I have the tablet, how the heck do I use it? The guys over at DESIGNM.AG have page with links to a whole wack of tutorials on using the Wacom tablet and digital painting. You should really check it out if you’re interesting in learning to use a tablet. Happy digital painting!

-Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer

40+ Tutorials for Working with Wacom Tablets

David Duchovny why won’t you love me?!

Shawn Woytowich — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:17:34 +0000

I was going through some of my old college projects the other day and came across this gem. It was afunny music video I had done for a Flash project and thought I’d share it with you. The video was never finished but I’d like to when time permits. The song is “David Duchovny” by Bree Sharp.

Enjoy!
-Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer

Studio preparation

Shawn Woytowich — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:58:58 +0000

For what has seemed like forever, I have been working on my “studio” aka my basement. It has taken an extra long amount of time mainly because my wife and I recently had a daughter.
Hoping to get it finish soon so I can really get designing again. In the mean time though, here are some shots of where it’s at

-Shawn Woytowich
Toronto Artist / Designer

Live Launch – Welcome

Shawn Woytowich — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:01:42 +0000

Welcome to the launch www.shawnwoytowich.com
Check the Bio section out for more information on Toronto artist / designer Shawn Woytowich.