Webmastering

It’s been a while, no?

It’s been a busy summer, fall, and Minnesota summer (i.e. winter) since I last posted here. I was actually going through Stencyl’s various websites and reviewing what all I will have to update in the future when I came across my blog again, interestingly enough. I looked at a title that said “Webmastering” and thought, “oh! Interesting.”

Stencyl’s development, for me, is in full swing at this point. As opposed to simple server administration (Stencyl now runs on two servers), as I have been doing for the past few months, I have also taken up the IDE once again and have begun to develop Stencyl’s release site. In addition, I am always working on the design of various features and working with Jon to determine Stencyl’s future direction.

Jon has promised bi-monthly development journals, and I would like to say that I will be contributing to those when I find it interesting. A lot of my work is kept in the dark because it’s pretty new and exciting (in our opinions), but I’m sure there’s a few things that I create, that I will be able to share.

As always, look forward to Stencyl’s release. I am as happy as ever to be working on Stencyl, and I hope that when Stencyl is released, you will feel the same way.

The previous post was a ploy to get users to come to this site from the World of Warcraft official forums. It worked better than I was expecting, according to the statistics log I will post sometime. Though it was an actual article, you may note my closing comments are about Stencyl in hopes that prying eyes will look at them.

Tee hee!

Everyone seems to enjoy speaking about themselves, so I figure I will jump on this bandwagon and tell you a little about myself. Perhaps I will talk more about real life in a future post, but for now, I would like to share the history of my internet life.

I am currently known as metziel (previously whitenights, Vitrix, meridius, or abael) and I am Stencyl’s server administrator, webmaster, and lead web programmer. I work here on Stencyl because of Eliwood, who I have known for about 5 years (?) now. Eliwood and I have known each other since the days of Warcraft III map-making, or as I prefer to call it, “the good ol’ days.” Eliwood was one of my main inspirations to pick up programming, and helped me along in those early days, programming for a very minor WC3 site. When Eliwood disappeared from the WC3 scene to work on projects for The Gaming Universe, namely GUReporter, I too quickly left WC3 and went to try to learn more about programming.

One of my main projects after that was a relatively minor World of Warcraft fansite, where I have programmed a number of small hacks as well as a full site to help them out. That site has been going downhill recently, because of time constraints on all the staff members. I need to thank the administrators there, however, since they are very cool people and have helped me grow as a site administrator and shown me what it is like to work hard on something you love. They also have given me a number of solid server recommendations, and it is because of their recommendation that Stencyl runs on the server it does today.

I got involved with Stencyl because of my connection to Eliwood back from WC3 and GUReporter. Eliwood basically sent me an email saying “hey, talk to me on MSN” and I said something like “sounds cool.” After he told me about the project, I said “sounds cool,” and offered to host Stencyl properly, on a dedicated server. I don’t know if that was his original intent behind inviting me, but here we are. I am also the primary coder behind Stencyl’s web resources, though you see very little of my work right now.

Outside of Stencyl, I enjoy soccer (and indoor soccer), the TV shows Heroes and 24, being 16 and doing all that entails, and of course, I love my dog Titan (picture coming soon.)

I’m always busy, either working on Stencyl, schoolwork, or coding tasks for my school. Literally, I don’t think I get a moment’s rest. If I do, I know it’s because I’m doing something wrong =)

In the future, I look forward to Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and anything else that Blizzard Entertainment creates. Of course, I am also 100% behind Stencyl for the future.