Popular artsite DeviantART has recently launched a new feature simply known as Groups, and I've taken the opportunity to make a Count Duckula one myself.
CastleDuckula via DAGroups
There, members can suggest favourites as well as submitting their own Count Duckula artwork, either into both the group and their own gallery or as an exclusive to the group. We do have rules that you may want to check out first, just to be on the safe side.
We're still in early days, but check us out sometime!
After over a year and constant bugging to get the people at Virgin to get their arses in gear with my personal webspace, I'm happy to announce that Duckyboos can be updated once again! I will now make some tweaks before I can give you all a big, fat update within the rest of this week.
I'm still having serious trouble gaining full access to the FTP of the Duckyboos site. I've tried various ways of viewing the contents of the FTP, and adding and otherwise modifying the files, but I still had the same errors. This has gone too long enough, so we have no choice but to perhaps phone them, and really push it.
However, it hurts me to say, that once the server actually works for me again, I will have to shut down Duckyboos for a while. It was easy to use this at first, but now I think it's about time I broke free from NTLWorld/Virgin's webspace. We'll then have to find somewhere to host it, mostly likely at a [hopefully affordable] price, and then it'll be online again, hopefully without such problems. But then, we also have some financial problems as well [we being my family], in fact, from what I've overheard, my parents had to shut down their bank account. So we're quite fucked at that one.
The Guestbook, Forum and Gallery will still be online though, because they are hosted externally, but the main site will be dormant at that time. I'll be writing up new pages and sprucing up the existing ones as needed.
I'm really dissatisfied with NTL's webspace service as a whole. Never mind the fact that you only get 55MB space for a start, Virgin doesn't provide an online site builder which I pretty would much needed, but they only have that for BlueYonder customers, whereas Virgin customers have to settle with FTP, and we all know now how much they cocked that up. After all, it was originally a mirror for when the original Fateback host somehow started failing to be viewed in certain countries, not that is was any good anyway but still.
Be prepared.
As I've already stated in the Duckyboos forums, I've experienced a serious problem updating the main site via FTP, due to an error that is most likely caused by the webspace itself. I can log into the account and see everything just fine, but when I try to upload any file to it, I receive an error saying "550: permission denied", meaning that somehow I don't have permission to do so. The same thing occured on my old computer, and I tried several other FTP programs as well as FireFTP which I use most, so it's most likely Virgin Media's doing, probably since I got this laptop.
Virgin's customer service is terrible. Some time ago we had to phone them to ask why our connection stopped working, and it took my poor mother 11 minutes to get through. I definitely won't try to contact this was, and emailing them is out of the question as well, so my only choice is to snail mail them once I get hold of the account number.
This really pissed me off last night, as I needed to make some updates mainly in celebration of the 20th anniversary Count Duckula's first broadcast.
Someday I'll break away from the iron chain that is NTLworld. :(
Hot damn, I can't believe it's been a full six months since our last update! Where does the time go? Anyway, I'm happy to announce that I have restored the Downloads section that I once cancelled. At the moment I have only made a wallpaper that I had made with one of my own fan-artworks available at the moment, but I'll be adding more, and I will enable the avatars and audio section shortly.
Also to add, from now on all news updates will be mirrored on the Blog in hopes for it to be a bit more interactive, ie. if you have something to say about an update, now you can!
Lastly, I have moved the guestbook to a new service called SmartGB, which is now located here. The old one had a very boring look and I was unable to reply to your wonderful feedback, but now I can. All is not lost though, for I have copied all of the old messages onto there, and I've responded to some of them, so check it out. ;)
Here's wishing you a merry ducky Quackmas!Just a quick post before I go to bed.
I've got plans in my mind for Duckyboos which involves moving the news and updates section from the main site into here not only to make it a pinch more active, but also to make the previous news posts more organised, and for future ones more easier to post. It'd save me having to knock one out of three posts, which I hand type into the index file, everytime I update, and from making new pages as the old news archive grows. Should I?
Good news for Duckula fans in South America, the second season has appeared to have been released!
Source: TruCinePortal.comI just discovered a new DVD release for Australia that is to be released on the 10th October 2007. Although the box contains 3 discs, only 18 episodes from the first season will appear on this release unfortunately, and the cover design isn't that great either. Still, good news for you Aussies that might have been unable to get hold of the first season from the US and UK.
Source.
Meanwhile in the UK, we're just days from our 3rd series set. I hope to get my copy cheaper this time, usually DVDs in ASDA are up to half the price of those sold in HMV and Virgin. The new choice would be whether to buy it before or during my holiday to Blackpool which will be on the 10th next month.
Screenshots from the episode "One Stormy Night" have been added to the Gallery. I've also created galleries for up to the 9th episode as I'm going through the first disc of my series 1 boxset, these have yet to be filled with screenshots which I will work on tonight and in the next few days.
We fellas in the UK are getting the third series of Count Duckula on DVD on September 3rd. No image yet [Play.com briefly used a photograph I took of the series 2 box from here!], but like the series 2 set, this will be a 2-disc DVD, but there doesn't seem to be any sign of special features... well, I don't know how they're going to divide this one up then if the third series only has 13 episodes...
Since I've barely done anything major for the site in about a month as I'm still waiting for the third series to come to DVD, I've decided to give a couple of my DVDs a review each [nothing too long at the moment, but they're there], and to make those accessable I've opened up a new page with info on VHS, audio and DVD releases of the cartoon.
I've also added a new Duckula blog called Crazy About Count Duckula to the Links section, be sure to check it out ;)
Just a few secs ago, I moved the Duckyboos fansite to a new location which can be found here. It was initially a mirror of the original at Fateback.com I made soon after I discovered that I had some ad-free webspace on my own ISP, Virgin Media [formerly known as NTL]. It was only 55MB, 5MB less than the original host, but I decided to take it on anyway to see if it made the site work for someone who couldn't view the original.
Fateback was horrible - it disallowed the uploading of MP3 files or any files more than 200KB [which was why I decided to host related images onto my Livejournal account], and it had this ad at the top of each page that interfered with my CSS. Not even Firefox's Adblock could block it. So in the end, I created a redirection page and wiped everything else off, while keeping the new host open.
I feel really bad... like, I'm rushing things without telling anyone, and it comes to a point where I feel that I don't know what I'm doing, but I do. I dunno...the Duckyboos project is my pride and joy, but I just feel like a crappy admin.
One thing's for sure though, the fansite won't be coming back to Fateback at dawn, Transylvanian Standard Time.
Yep, just like the way Duckula transports his castle to another location by simply entering his coffin, Duckyboos has moved to a new piece of webspace. This is because I'm no longer satisfied with the old host, and that certain visitors were unable to view the original site. I've also updated the FAQ with a few new questions, and I've been adding some old unfinished artworks I've made within the past year to the gallery.
We greatly apologise for any inconveniences caused by the move.
As the Duckyboos Blog celebrates its first birthday this week, another empty space is filled on the fansite - the products page. However I've yet to compile the pages within that! [groan], but I've complied a little guide about looking for and buying Count Duckula merchandise, like do's and don'ts and so forth.
I've also updated the About page slightly to suit current events about myself ^^;
It's been a year now since I opened up this blog and made its first post, which as a reminder can be found here. Within then we've had visitors from over 40 countries, and over 3,000 hits since I started counting in November. I want to thank everyone who's visited for their great support for this fan project, in which I hope to better for years to come!
The clock just turned midnight here, and Count Duckula: The Complete Second Series, is now officially available on DVD!
Where to buy
You can either buy the DVD online at the following websites:
Just to let everyone know, that I've finally got a new page up, that page being the Special Thanks & Credits page. Just something to show my gratitude to all of you guys who've shown their support for Duckyboos, all good sites have them.
My good buddy Kroc has also helped me fix some bugs that had mostly affected Internet Explorer 7 users, and clean away some scrap coding. It's all so mind-boggling for me, no wonder I made so many mistakes!
[Image blantently nicked from Amazon]
