The Rubberslug Blog

Hi! Welcome to the all-new Rubberslug. This project has been six months in the making!

We've been in a sort of maintenance mode for a long while, so I took it upon myself to escape from real life for a few months and create a replacement from the ground up that converts all the old stuff into new stuff. I'd estimate that about 95% of the public-facing site is brand new, as well as 70-80% of the members-only area. It's still a little rough around the edges at the moment, but I've got to get back to real life! This has taken a little longer than expected so hopefully it's a good place to start from for future improvements.

Some highlights:

• New Gallery Browser - With some fancy sleuthing, we're able to make a guess what sections in your gallery are from popular works. This can be tweaked to include or exclude certain shows/movies/comics. If you have a suggestion or corection for a tag, let us know in the forum.
• Improved Search Engine Traffic - The new site has been designed to drive maximum traffic to your galleries with the use of tags (as mentioned above) and some other various optimizations.
• Broader Focus Outside Anime - We plan to improve the support and networking potential for collectors of non-Japanese animation art and comic production art collectors. Stay tuned!
• New Front Page - Organized to bring all the best, most recent stuff on the site to the front for quick access. Finally, you'll be able to preview what's in a gallery update without clicking through! Other features include the ability to upload your own feature images and hide thumbnails from updates for browsing at work or in a family environment.
• New Market - The market will automatically handle offers and fixed-price purchases and let you manage these by e-mail or from a central control panel in your member area. We're still deciding if there's going to be a fee or sponsorship requirements to sell in the market, but for now all of those requirements are waived.
• Automatic Sponsorship - Track your sponsorship status online. We're moving towards a subscription model. It puts less of a burden on everyone involved. Support the site for pennies a day!
• Better Data Security - We're currently in the process of moving everything over to Amazon for rapid, secure, worldwide distribution. Vastly reduced server maintenance surprises! Freeing up these resources on our end will allow us to do some pretty awesome things in the future.

For questions, comments, and bug fixes, please post a message in the forum. We hope you bear with us while we work out the kinks and make Rubberslug better than ever. Thanks!

Jason Nolasco (noisywalrus)

Twitter: @plaintext

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nolasco/