Cleaning it up.

Well, the old Cocoia.com has been retired forever. For the sake of history, here’s the old website design, which I did in the third quarter of 2007;

In its place will be this teaser page, until the new, dynamic combination of Icon Designer and Cocoia will be opened. I will assure you, it will finally be a logical place where you can easily find a lot of downloads and resources to download. The release be accompanied by the release of my Forgotten Mainframe and Orion Extended set - and oh, some extra’s.

Check out the new design and my favorite internet places on Cocoia.com - and I’ll see you all when the new site goes live!

January First.

Regardless of time zones, Cocoia wishes you a successful, fun, and above all iconic 2008! Expect new regular blog updates to recommence soon after I have recovered from the exuberant partying.

I want to thank Jelmar from Typehigh for the best typography of 2007 (the header font of this blog design, for example), all my clients who made my dream of working on what I love to do possible, and all you readers for keeping up with my erratic posting. I wish you all the best!

Uh, oops.

Well, Mediatemple was kind enough to inform me over email that I would be getting an overage of $3851,- or more if I were to continue transferring data at the insane rate that I am. Yeah, Orion, the so well received set, has gone over a few odd terabytes now - something I can’t say has ever happened in my life as a website owner. I have, first and foremost, upgraded my server, but I think I might have to move to another hosting solution, or something like S3 for bulk data transfer.

Offering help, advice? Drop a comment if you will.

Orion: the Aftermath

My, what a few insane days it has been. Orion hit the Apple website, while also being linked from other major sites like the Iconfactory. At the moment of writing, Orion just exceeded a grand total of 300 GB in downloads, with well over 150,000 new visitors on my websites. Actually, it’s the fourth most downloaded thing on Apple.com, just under iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari.

I got a lot of email asking how to use the icons, and I gladly replied; Kupuk’s great tutorial of the ‘good ol’ manual way’, and Panic’s awesome Candybar 3. Of course, your downloads are flattening and the kind emails and comments have been very encouraging. Work on the extended set of Orion, with all system replacements for Mac, Windows, and Linux, along with several creative new folder motifs, has commenced already. I will push out a new volume with a complete system replacement icons, and a dock for OS X, late in December or in January. What’s that? A sneak peek? Okay, one of the ‘fantasy’ microsets in the extended Orion is… a ’sci-fi’ themed, highly detailed EVE Online architecture set.

Permission from CCP Games pending.

What is most important in all of this, is your feedback. You want more folders? What kind of folders? Your vote counts! As the cumulative comments of this blog are reaching 500 fast, there is chance that your comment will be the 500th - which means prizes, baby!

Drop your requests in this post’s comments and have a fair chance of winning a full license for Noble, my stock icon set, and a single folder icon request for the upcoming extended Orion iconset that will be fulfilled - guaranteed!. Of course, comments on all posts are eligible - be sure to use your actual email address.

Flickr Pro.

I purchased a Flickr Pro account today, having the benefit of unlimited uploads, sets, and collections seemed like a great deal to me and I have come to love flickr over the time I had an account there. To put the new account to good use, I registered my personal part of flickr and added a good lot of sketches and a more complete set of icons I have made (although far from everything).

You can find my account at www.flickr.com/photos/cocoia/ from now on.

New freeware iconset release: Orion.

( Go to icon set directly)

For the last month, I have been working on a freeware icon set to supersede all my older work. I was interested in how much I could learn by attracting critique from the most valued artists and criticasters I have in my buddy lists and address book, and I took it all to the heart. I decided to make a folder set that would find the middle ground between the flat front-on perspective of Mac OS X Leopard and the old, spatial perspective of folders in Tiger.

Continue reading New freeware iconset release: Orion….

Preview of upcoming release; limited edition prints.

Coinciding with a new freeware icon release and a very large batch of client work, Cocoia will soon start selling a series of prints in line with the work I used to make before I started this blog. If you are unaware of what kind of graphic work I did, this might be a nice chance to explore the expressive prints in my ancient deviantART gallery (this work is not representative of my current quality standard, please keep that in mind).

The recurrent theme in the prints is nature conquering our technological leaps. The icons I shall be dealing out will remain shrouded in mystery, for now.

Blog fixes; Solved ‘whitespace’ folders in WP-Uploads folder.

I solved problems with uploaded images in my previous posts today with a huge hand from Brian, who solved this rather peculiar problem very elegantly.

The issues were centered on the tendency of my old Wordpress install putting files in a path like this;

blog.cocoia.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/month/%20%20/uploadedfile.jpg

Read on for the solution.

Continue reading Blog fixes; Solved ‘whitespace’ folders in WP-Uploads folder….

Minor blog hitches and changes.

Over the course of the day I have been upgrading the blog to Wordpress 2.3, a great upgrade of my favorite blogging platform that helps reduce loading times, add sidebar features and plug security holes. I have also adjusted a lot of stylesheet properties to prevent justified text, strange headline typography and general appearance tweaks.

You may have noticed the blog going down for a few minutes today, then back up with a default theme, and having bumpy service for an hour as the uploaded files were being restored. This is the last time such a public ‘rebuilding’ will happen; in the meantime, I have a working ‘Maintenance Mode’ plugin now to disable the blog for fixes. I will schedule a maintenance in two days for graphical fixes and more feature additions like back to home-links. Got more input? Let me know in the comments.

Edit; Yes, the permalink structure is revamped as well!

Edit (11:23 GMT); Header is now clickable again.

Final edit (0:25 GMT); Footer fixes, still having trouble with images posts past this month. Can someone help me with the problem that all old uploads are in a folder called ‘ ‘ (whitespace)? No FTP app seems to be able to navigate into these folders, but you can with some commandline trickery. Leave tips in the comments.

New blog!

Cocoia is proud to announce the launch of the fourth major version of the Cocoia blog. As you might have noticed, it’s the first blog theme I made that took me over a day to complete. In fact, I dislike webdesign so much, that it took me weeks to get right. Now that every part of my blog looks exquisit, it is also time to spice up my posting frequency and the material I write about. A few of the additions are ‘read more’ links (introduced in this post), more legible text and logical separation of blog ‘functions’ and content.

Continue reading New blog!…