Travis

Hi Larry. Welcome to the Village. We're glad you found us. Since I'm knee-deep in snow, I'm a little envious of you location. Sounds like you're living the good life...living on a tropical island with your scroll saw. Anyway, welcome aboard. Jump in and have some fun!

OK...so I think I have the Wiki back. I was debating if I should bring it back or not. In the end, I decided to revive the ghost. It does have a lot of good info and I couldn't bare to part with it. Plus its easy to add stuff to it. Before the move, I was able to deter most of the spam. I'll still have to keep a close eye on it, but I'm glad to have it back. The restoration was pretty painless. It should work the same as before. Again, if you see anything strange, let me know.

A sign of a happy scroller is a bin of cutoff scraps that "might be useful" in the future.

HA! Squashed that bug. I think it should work now. I was wondering why SSV traffic was so bad yesterday...guests couldn't reach the Gallery. Let me know if anybody else has any issues with the Gallery.

Oh...found it. I guess you get that message if you're not logged in. I hate it when the computer is smarter than me. Hrmmmm...lemme see what I can figure out.

Hrmmm....Which section were you trying to go to? Were you trying to upload a pic, or just browse?

I got my secret santa gift! This is a cool little puzzle of a Koala bear. Apparently, it came in last week, but got stashed with all the other presents that needed to be wrapped. So I came across it on Sunday while wrapping the last of the gifts. Thank you Secret Santa. You did a great job on it. My son is really getting good at putting it together too. Merry Christmas!

I've been working on the Gallery for the last couple days. The software has been updated and I've been trying to get it to look like the old version. I think it looks pretty good. I also made the Gallery Menu a bit different. I think its much more intuitive this way. Kick the tires a bit and see if you see anything odd. A couple changes from the old Gallery: [*:3lmlg8bt]The gallery no longer has the feature where you can check the box below a thumbnail to add to your download cart. You now have to click the actual file. The info box below the picture has the option of adding it to the download cart. From there, you can check out your download cart and download the ZIP as normal. Likewise, to remove a pattern from the download cart, you'll have to click the pic and choose Remove from Download Cart. [*:3lmlg8bt]There is still the bug in the software where some User Albums are unnamed with only one picture. When you click the picture, it goes nowhere. I still don't know what causes this. I was kinda hoping that the update would fix it, but it hasn't. I may have to ask for tech support from the developers. I hesitate to do so because they're complete...ahem....jerks. Other than that, everything should work fine. Let me know if you see something I don't.

I like the modification to the pattern. That looks great! I think $6 is a bit low. But it always depends on your market. If folks are willing to pay $8-12 for the ornament, then by all means charge that much. Check out Target and see what their more interesting ornaments are selling for. You'd be surprised by what they're asking for the China-Made mass produced ornaments. You're selling handcrafted art, which has more value. Especially recent (last few years), there has been a bigger appreciation for handcrafted items.

I'm glad you're enjoying the class. Learning to design your own patterns really adds a neat dimension to the scroll sawing hobby. I look forward to seeing your first project.

I think that's based on Carole Rothman book, Wooden Bowls from the Scroll saw She has some nice video tutorials on her blog too: http://scrollsawbowls.blogspot.com/ They're in the archives at the beginning of her blog. Really neat. I'm sure they're great sellers.

Hrmmm....messman was having that trouble too. I haven't run into the issue myself. I see others have been uploading fine. I'll have to experiment around with it a bit and see if I can figure something out. The only thing I can think of is its timing out. Are they large files?

Anybody else having Gallery trouble? Seems to work OK on my side. The thumbnails are missing. But hopefully the actual attachment is there. Here's kinda a rundown of the attachments issue: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3898

I don't know much specifically about the Excalibur EX11. But I know the Excalibur in tends to be the Cadillac of scroll saws. Is it the purple one? If its the 90's, that is a bit old. I'd imagine there has been significant changes since then. I would give it a test drive if possible.

OK. I think I got the attachments from older posts to work. Unfortunately, I think the thumbnails are lost. So when you see a post with an attachment, you might see a broken image or a red x. You can still click those to view the full size image. But the thumbnails are gone. From what I'm reading, I'm not sure if there's much I can do about the missing thumbnails. I'll keep researching in hopes to find the solution. A long and laborious solution is to click the broken thumbnail image, download the picture, then re-upload. I'll keep working on it. I just wanted everyone to know the files are there, even if the thumbnail isn't.

OK...so I think I have the Gallery figured out. You should be able to upload pictures to the Pattern Library as well as to your own personal album. If you need to create a new album, check under the "My Profile" menu option. There you'll find a place to add albums. Comments have also been turned on for the Gallery. Enjoy!

You can check out the courses in the Village University forum. There's a GIMP tutorial on making portrait style patterns. There's also an Inkscape tutorial on how to make just about everything else.

I'll see about getting that up and working tomorrow. Right now I'm trying to figure out where all the forum attachments went. They were working just fine before the move, now they're gone. Hrmmmm.....

Since you couldn't come to SSV for the last few days, that means you have more shop-time, right? What have you been working on?

Holy cow, that was an ordeal. The forum move went without a hitch. But moving the gallery was a pain! It took 2 days for me to work out the bugs and get it to function correctly. But I finally got it. A couple of notes now that we're on our new server: [*:9het48ca]Things are going to look a bit ugly for awhile. I lost some of my styling, so I'll be working on that over the next few days. [*:9het48ca]The Gallery theme is a default theme. As such, it doesn't have the navigation window at the top of the screen to bounce back and forth to and from forum. Just remember the forum is at http://www.scrollsawvillage.com/forum [*:9het48ca]Some of the Gallery functions have not been installed yet. The ones that come to mind is the BB Code and possibly the download cart. [*:9het48ca]Some other functions may not be turned on yet either. Since I upgraded the software to the forum and gallery, I have new options. I just need a few hours to go through and configure everything. [*:9het48ca]The Wiki is not available. I'll remove that link tomorrow. I'm still trying to decide if its worth putting back on. But right now, its waaaaay down on my priority list. [*:9het48ca]The newsletter signup isn't available yet. [*:9het48ca]Vector, I noticed you uploaded a few files to the gallery (I thought it was turned off with the board, but I guess not.) I'll track down those files tomorrow, so don't delete them or anything. Other than that, the forum and the gallery should work just fine now. If you run into any error messages or any other bugs (other than cosmetic stuff), post them in this thread. Thanks for baring with me during this move, guys. I know it sux not being to able to access a community you've grown accustomed to visiting with each and every day. I really appreciate your patience.

Spiral blades are a tricky matter. Some people love them, other hate them. I really like them in certain situations. I use them mostly for portraits. It works really well for organic/curvy lines. I don't use them on patterns that have a lot of straight lines, or crisp corners. Heavily grained woods don't work well either because the blade has a tendency to follow the grain. Stack cutting works, but you have to be careful since you have to push the work into the blade a bit. You're more likely to flex the blade which will throw off the cuts on the bottom of the stack. Its true they have a bigger kerf than straight blades. Basically a spiral blade is a straight blade that has been twisted. So your kerf size is the same size as the depth of the blade. The term "reverse" refers to the tooth configuration. Just like a straight blade, a reverse blade has teeth pointing the opposite direction at the top and bottom of the blade. This reduces the fuzzies (it certainly doesn't eliminate them). You might want to give them a try on a portrait style cutting (not stack cut) with a lot of organic/curvy lines and see if you change your mind. If not, I'm sure lots of folks would love to have your blades in stead of throwing them in the trash.

That was fun. I had trouble with #5 for a bit. Thanks for the puzzle!

On the plus side, all the software will be updated! You'll notice it more-so in the gallery. As you probably have noticed, the User Gallery is a bit buggy with files being put in weird places. Hopefully with the update, everything will work smoother. I'm trying to decide what to do with the Wiki. I might remove it all together and port the information to individual pages. The wiki tends to be a spam magnet and takes a lot of maintenance. Since I'm pretty much the only one who adds to it, it might be better as individual pages. Hmmmm....still thinking.

I got an email from my web-host today. Apparently SSV is "too popular." They want me to upgrade my hosting plan to one that costs $180/month. Currently SSV costs me about $300/year to operate, which I'm usually able to recuperate from advertising. But there's absolutely no way I can recuperate $2400 for a year. So I guess I'll be moving SSV to a different host. I use a different host for my other websites (I have a number of other woodworking & hobby websites). I think I'll be moving it over there. A buddy of mine has a forum there that has more traffic than I do and he hasn't had any problems. So I guess I'll give it a try. I have 7 days to "fix the problem," so I guess I'll be spending Thanksgiving weekend moving the site. I just wanted to give everybody a heads up that things might look goofy, act wonky, or flat-out not be able to access the website for blocks of time over the weekend. Messing around with PHP, My SQL, HTML, and Java is not much fun (I'm not a computer engineer), so wish me luck.