Preservation Efforts
Flash has gone but Doodlelong has returned online with some compromises.
Website address change
Doodlelong.com is moving to the Frosty Badger website.
8 Years and Still Doodling
It has been 8 years since doodle #1 started it.
News
New! Gallery Area
Now you can browse through the 10,000+ doodles of doodlelong and it's FUN!
Let's face it, one doodle at a time along a slow, scrolling frame isn't a winner when you have this many. While it's still important that we exhibit doodlelong as one loong-ass continuous doodle, now there's another way too.
So checkout the new Gallery page which also doubles as a showcase for the prestigious "Highlights" (much better than what-was the fiddly page navigation cramped in the side bar).
Note also that a few other changes to the site have been made. We've dropped the Contacts page, moving its brief details to bottom of the About page. And we've re-labeled the "Home" page to "Doodle!" because it makes a lot more sense (and looks cooler).
Posted by Dominic Manley, 21st February 2008
Back to Australia
Doodlelong has moved servers (again). It's now back in its home country, Australia. Why? Well because the US-based hosting that we switched to some time ago hasn't been working out. For those that noticed the website being a bit flakey lately, things should be much better now.
Posted by Dominic Manley, 12th February 2008
Doodlelong on the Wii
Since the addition of the Flash 7 compatible version of doodlelong you can use it with many more devices than before. One of them is Nintendo's Wii console.
The Wii's Internet Channel has just been updated by Opera, the company that develops its browser technology. As far as we can tell, Doodlelong works flawlessly on it compared with a desktop PC and that's something to be proud of. Many other websites we've checked out, particuarly those using Flash, seem to have issues displaying correctly (or even at all).
If you decide to give it a go, you'll notice a message replaces the doodlelong flash object when you first visit the site. Contained within that there is a link to the version of doodleong that will work on the Wii.
Let us be the first to say, doodling with a Wiimote is not easy!
Posted by Dominic Manley, 14th April 2007
Replacing Earlier Doodles
We've added some new code to doodlelong that counters an early bug in the system that allowed repeat doodles to be saved. The same code also allows us to flag any extremely offensive doodles for replacement.
If you were around in the early days you may remember that doodlelong suffered from a bug that allowed the same doodles to be saved more than once. It happened most frequently when artists weren't sure if they'd clicked the "Save" button or not (we still don't have a progress indicator on that - it's on the todo list). However, there were one or two cases where it wasn't an innocent occurence and we had long lines of the same offensive doodles. Even though the ability to repeat-save a doodle was corrected early on (around the 4400 mark), those that were submitted before that have still remained to this day. That's about to change.
When you next save a doodle you might notice it doesn't get added to the end of the line but instead to somewhere in the middle. If this happens, the message will tell you why and it'll be for one of two reasons which will happen in order of priority.
It replaced a doodle that was flagged by us as being too offensive. By that we don't mean the oodles of phallic doodles that are present. While we'd prefer contributions to be slightly more original and artistic we also want dooodlelong to represent the creative works of anyone and everyone and if that means lots of giant genitals then so be it.
However, there are some doodles that are a little too much for us to stomach and we want them gone, despite losing some of the demographic representation.
It replaced a doodle that was saved more than once. As explained before, countering the earlier bug in the system. It'll also correct out statistical representation of doodlelong which currently includes repeat-doodles.
When things are cleared up, new doodles will once again start saving to the end of the line.
Posted by Dominic Manley, 13th April 2007
New Website Design
Well we finally got around to it. New design, updated flash object and a few other neat features. If you're interested, here's some of things that have changed:
- Most apparent is the new logo and design. We hope you like them both. We're still very grateful for the past logo contributions that were actual doodles but found it tricky to incorporate them into a more sophisticated design.
- What was once known as the "Hall of Fame" is now simply called "Highlights" and is powered by an AJAX paging navigation system. We're still working on that but it's definately more scalable than the previous method of viewing all the selected doodles on one page.
- We have a video page. We've not really explored animating doodlelong doodles much yet, other than the example up we posted on YouTube. There's definately room for much more creativity there so we've created a special page for them in the future and a tutorial on how anyone can animate each doodle.
- The statistics have been shifted out of the flash object and into a new stats page. There's more information available now and its easier for us to modify / improve in the future. There was never any real reason to have it built into the flash object.
- There's now a separate doodlelong flash object that will work with the earlier version 7 of Adobe/Macromedia's plugin. This means it can be used on devices such as the Wii console. The only loss of functionality in the Flash 7 version of doodlelong is having to reload the page to jump to specific doodles when clicking on the links in the highlights side area.
- We now have some basic RSS feeds, listed on the news page. Aside from the obvious, you can also track all new doodles or just doodles that have been highlighted by us (i.e. the best of 'em). If you've only a passing interest in doodlelong you can use these feeds to trigger you to pop back at wide intervals rather than just forget we're here!
Posted by Dominic Manley, 27th March 2007
