All the News That’s Fit to Print
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Monday Novenber 18, 2002:
Temporary Digs
Whatever you do, don’t call me a liar.
I was offline for more than a few weeks. My five month hiatus could not be helped however.
When I got back online at the begining of October, teamdeim.com was down. This was also supposed to be for a couple of weeks. 2 1/2 months have passed since it went down, due to the unforseen circumstances which befell the server's owner.
teamdeim.com
will be back online eventually, but until it is, the emporium has just
been uploaded to its old home at Fortune City, which has been empty and
neglected since the emporium moved to New DooM way back in August of 2000.
The emporium will remain here until teamdeim.com is up and running again.
Saturday April 27, 2002:
I am Going to be Offline for a While
It is sad, but true.
The school year has ended, and I will be moving back home today. Because of this move, I will temporarily be without an ISP, and will probably be offline for a few weeks.
For those of you who wish to submit skins to the emporium:
It is probably not a good idea to send skins to my hotmail address while I am gone. Hotmail no longer accepts e-mails that push the account size up over 2048kb, and with only about 1300kb currently available in the account, there is only enough room for a small number of skins.
The alleviate this problem, I have recently opened a new e-mail account at Yahoo. This account has 4096kb available for use, and is probably the better place to send skins to. The new account is [email protected].
See you
in a few weeks.
Monday April 22, 2002:
Update Alert! The Emporium Hits 300!
I really must appologize to EE users. The New Arrivals page is loading rather slowly right now. It can't be helped. With the addition of 62 new skins to the emporium, all those preview graphics are just slowing the load up time down to a crawl.
Enjoy!
Friday January 18, 2002:
Happy Birthday to Me!
Yup. Today is my birthday, and what better way is there to cellebrate, than to add 40 new skins to the emporium!
Freed from the file server shell game at New DooM, and blessed with a little extra time on my hands, I managed to finally clear out the backlog of skins I have been worrying about for so long.
So raise
your glass for a toast, and enjoy the new skins!
Saturday January 5, 2002:
The Path of Least Resistance
You will be glad to know that I have finished uploading the emporium’s skin files to teamdeim.com. Everything should be working smoothly again.
Users should find the emporium a little easier to use now. Unlike many of the file servers provided by New DooM, downloading skins from teamdeim.com will not require the user to go to a separate page to get the download started.
Life is good.
Enjoy!
Thursday January 3, 2002:
Argh! He we go again!
It seems that New DooM can’t go any more than a few months without changing its file server. Over the 17 months the emporium has been here, New DooM has switched file servers six times, which works out to an average of once every three months.
This has had a rather severe negative impact on the emporium in a couple of ways:
First of all, it has rendered the files and links on the emporium useless six times over the last year and a half. Conservatively, I estimate that it takes me a minimum of two weeks on average to get the files uploaded to the new server (whatever it is) and fix the file links—one week to find out about the problem via a complaint on the forum, and another week to do the actual fix. This means that the emporium has not been able to provide its service for 3 months out of the last 17. This is not acceptable, as it has likely discouraged users from visiting the site. Most users have a tendency not to return to web sites with a lot of useless links. I know I don’t.
Secondly, I don’t have a lot of time to work on the emporium. Creating previews and preparing the files for upload is time consuming, but what little time I have had to work on the emporium has not been spent on preparing new skins for upload. Instead, it has been consistently squandered on finding out how to connect to the file server du jour, reuploading all the same files, and fixing all the links yet again. I have skin files on my hard drive that have been waiting to be added to the emporium for months—some of them have been waiting there for as long as a year, but in spite of this, the selection of files on the emporium has remained pretty much unchanged since the big December 15th, 2000 update over a year ago. You can imagine the effect the lack of updates has had on return users. If there is never anything new, why should anyone bother coming back?
So I am left with two options. I can either learn the idiosyncrasies of New DooM’s latest file server, upload again, and live with the uneasy prospect of having to do it all again in a couple of months, or I could upload the emporium’s skins to an independant server, in the hope that it will remain as a stable repository for a longer, hopefully indefinate, period of time.
Luckily, fellow Team DeiM member, Rellik, has offered to let me keep the emporium’s files at teamdeim.com. Rellik’s brother runs Team DeiM’s server, so I am pretty sure things will remain stable there for a little while at least.
Thanks Jim.
The down
side to this arrangement is that I have been having difficulty getting
a good connection to teamdeim.com, so the uploading of the files to their
new home is rather slow and tedious. It will be a couple of weeks
before all of the files are in place. Please be patient. Not
all of files will bring up the dreaded 404. I hope to have everything
working soon.
Tuesday November 27, 2001:
Completing the Second Century.
I found
some of the older files that were missing after I removed them from the
emporium back in August, and restored them to the site. This tops
up the emporium’s inventory to a nice round 200 skins. The second
century is now complete. It is time to go on to the third.
Thursday November 22, 2001:
Updated At Last.
For several months I have been promising to add new skins to the emporium. For several months a variety of factors have stopped me from doing so, including firewall problems, file space restrictions, and uncertainty over file servers, but I have finally prevailed! (And the crowd goes wild!)
23 new skins have been added to the emporium. With the restoration of a number of skins a few days ago, this brings the total number of skins in the emporiums’s inventory up to a robust and healthy 194. The Epidermis Emporium is bigger and better than ever.
To see the new skins, look for the files in the emporium’s regular categories with the green preview buttons labeled “NEW”, or click here to go to the New Arrivals page.
Enjoy.
Tuesday November 20, 2001:
Triumphant Return.
Back on August 3rd of this year, I was forced to remove a number of files from the site, due to file space restrictions at New DooM.
Since then, New DooM has changed files servers yet again, and the amount of room increased. If fact, still another file server switch is planned, with a full 50 Mb of juicy file space for me to use—just what an archive like the emporium needs.
I waited for word of the new server, but my requests for registration were never answered. I got sick of waiting, and finally decided to take advantage of the file space I do have by restoring the files removed on August 3rd. If and when the new file server becomes available, I will transfer the emporium’s files there.
All except nine of the skins have now been restored. I hope to recover the other nine soon.
In the meantime,
I have prepared 18 new skins to be added to the site. You
should be seeing them sometime within the next week.
Saturday September 22, 2001:
They’re Baaaack!
It took
me a while, but I uploaded the files to the new New DooM review centre.
They’re all back, and the links are all working. The emporium is
back in business again.
Thursday September 20, 2001:
The Great Link.
For the
fourth time in a year, I am feeling the effects of a change in New DooM’s
server. 
I am now
connected to the New DooM review centre, and I am slowly uploading the
files again. The review centre is rather time consuming, so I ask
you to be patient a little bit longer. I am uploading the existing
files category by category. Conversions I is now uploaded, and the
links on the Conversions I page have been updated. I will work my
way down the list of categories until I have the skin packs uploaded.
Then I can get to work on the new skins.
Saturday September 15, 2001:
The Update is Coming.
I know I said it a month ago, but it really is coming now. I had been delayed, because of changes being made to New DooM’s files setup. The file links here on the site are temorarily not working. This is because of the new review centre.
I will be
uploading files to the review centre over the next few weeks, which will
allow me to finally do the kind of update I have been wanted to do for
a considerable length of time.
Tuesday
September 11, 2001:
(Revised
September 15, 2001)
Bin Laden Must Die.
If you have a website, please download this picture, and add it to your site.
To download
it, right click on it, and select “Save Picture As...”
Wednesday August 15, 2001:
The Update is Coming.
Before I say anything else, I would like to thank Looney2ner for creating that lovely birthday cake for the emporium. It was a few days belated, but that was my fault for not asking him about making it until the last minute. Now that it is ten days on, it may not seem appropriate to some for me to continue keeping the cake up, but it is nice and festive, so I think I will leave it up just a little bit longer, until I get the update done.
The update
is being delayed, unfortunately.
The good folks at the Mindless Games Network are currently making changes
to their file server's protocols, temporarily preventing me from adding
the new skins. I have been assured that the changes will be completed
shortly. I certainly hope so. I will be returning back to the
college residence sometime between now and August 27. Once there,
I will once again be hooked up to the net via the college's firewalled
server, and will only be able to make changes to the site by hopping a
bus across town, and uploading from a friend's machine, assuming I can
get permission to do so.
Saturday August 4, 2001:
Happy Birthday Epidermis Emporium!
That’s right! It has been an entire year since the Epidermis Emporium set up for business here at newdoom.com. The emporium is one year old! (If you want to get picky about it, the emporium is now one year plus one month old, because the original version of the emporium was set up at Geocities on July 4, 2000.)
It has been a long and interesting year. I had been stuck behind a firewall for most of it, making it very difficult to update the site. This was especially troublesome, because New DooM changed its file server three times over this past year, rendering the file links useless three times. I would estimate that six to eight weeks of the last year was spent with useless links.
In spite of the firewall conumdrum, I did manage to perform a major update of the site on December 15, 2000. The look of the site changed completely with this update, and 60 skins were added, making the Epidermis Emporium the largest DooM skins site on the net.
Presently, 41 files, containing 44 skins, have been removed from the site. This has dropped the emporium's total number of skins from 180 down to 136. Do not be alarmed. There are aproximately 40 new skins waiting to replace the old ones, and the old files will soon be going to the Epidermis Emporium Downtown, and will still be available.
Also, I have now added the DooM Skins Trouble Shooting F.A.Q. to the site. This is a Q & A list covering the most comon questions and mistakes that I have encountered over the past year. A list of rules for submitting skin files to the emporium has been added. Hopefully, this will eliminate some of the more annoying things I have been having to deal with, like unfinished skins, and skins with unknown authors.
The new skins should be arriving in the next couple of days. Additional tweeking of the site should be occuring in the next few weeks, before I return to school, and get stuck behind that firewall again.
I wanted
to celebrate this special ocassion with all the new skins in place, but
I was unable to prepare the new previews in time. 
To make up for it, however, I have decided to make the
original Epidermis Emporium page available for viewing once again.
None of the links work, and the previews work only partially, but here
it is for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
Friday August 3, 2001:
The Axe Has Fallen.
Yes. The dreaded day has come. In order to keep the emporium within the new file space restrictions at New DooM, and allow room for new and updated skins, I have deleted the 41 least popular files from the site. This has reduced the emporium’s inventory by 44 skins.
Now please don’t panic.
With tomorow being the emporium’s first birthday here at New DooM, I will be trying my best to add new files to the site, which I have received since the last big update in December. Some of the files that were deleted today may actually rejoin the emporium tomorow as updated versions.
As for the rest...
I will be setting up a new companion site, called "The Epidermis Emporium Downtown", at the emporium’s old digs at Geocities. In a small way, the emporium will be coming home. It will be nice to have something there. It has been empty for so long.
The new
site will have its own look and feel. I hope to have it up and running
some time within the next week.
Thursday July 26, 2001:
A Note On Downloads.
It has come to my attention that a few users have been having difficulties in downloading skin files from the emporium. This problem is not unique to the Epidermis Emporium, and only affects a small minority of users.
The downloading difficulties stem from the fact that the Epidermis Emporium (and all other web sites hosted by newdoom.com) now stores all of its downloads on the Mindless Games Network file server. This file server does not allow the use of download accelerators, which use an unacceptably large amount of the server’s band width. As yet, Netscape users do not seem to be having any trouble.
If you are
having difficulty, and are unable to download any of the files here at
the Epidermis Emporium, please try disabling download acceleration, or
try downloading the files using Netscape.
Sunday June 24, 2001
The Epidermis Emporium needs your help!
Okay folks. Due to the new 20 Mb size limit being placed on hosted sites here at New DooM, I am going to have to reduce the size of the Epidermis Emporium. In order to do this, I will have to remove all of the least popular skins from the site, and keep the most popular. In fact, I will want to reduce the current number of files by nearly half, so that I can add the new skin files I have received since the December 15 update.
Up until April, I could have selected the less popular skins easily, by checking the number of downloads for each skin in the New DooM files section. Unfortunately, the files section has been moved to a new server, which means that the download statistics have all been reset to zero, and I will not be able to use them to decide which skins to delete and keep.
THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN:
I need you to rate the skins here at the emporium. Write down the name of each zip file, check out the preview, and give the file a rating from 1 to 10. When you are finished, e-mail your list of ratings to me at [email protected]. In a couple of weeks, I will tabulate the ratings, average them, and remove the least popular skins from the emporium.
I know it will be tedius to come up with a rating for all 146 files (180 skins—more if you include repeated skins), in six categories, but this is extremely important. I need as many people to rate the skins as possible, in order to best decide which skins must go.
The skins that don’t make the grade will go to a seperate site tentatively called “The Epidermis Emporium Downtown”. EE Downtown will NOT be a mirror site, NOR will it be used as cheap way of enlarging the emporium itself. EE Downtown will be an independent site. It will have its own look and style, and the only links to it on the emporium will be one on the main page, and a second on the links page.
This should allow the continued existance of the emporium, keeping it within the new size limit, and avoiding any breech of the emporium’s hosting agreement with newdoom.com.
—Mark Quinn (a.k.a. Boingo)
Friday December 15, 2000
Man! What an Update!
It has been a full four months since I last performed an update on this site. It hasn’t been my fault. Shortly after my last update, I moved into a college residence with a digital connection directly to the school’s server. Great! Free internet! The bad news is that the college’s system has a firewall in place, and I haven’t been able to get around it. This has prevented me from connecting my FTP program to the site to perform any updates. I will have to make up for this lack of updates, however, with one Hell of an update! Here’s what’s been added:
More than 60 skins have been added to the site—a greater than 50% increase in the number of skins! There are now 180 skins in the emporium, making the Epidermis Emporium the largest Legacy/ZDooM skin site on the net! The closest competition I have seen has only 60 or 70 skins. In other words, I have added more skins than the number of skins they have!
New skin previews have been added. The old previews were not very good. They were a relic from the days when the emporium was at Fortune City. Fortune City always put a large banner at the top of every page, including the preview windows, so I had to design an oversized preview window that would fit the banner, as well as the preview itself. When the emporium moved to New DooM, the oversized preview windows with the little animated sprites looked rather stupid. I had assumed that I would have a chance to change them when I got to school. I didn’t know that I would be stuck behind a firewall.
The
old style preview. Not very good, eh?
In the new previews, I have doubled the size of the animations for easier viewing. I have also added backgrounds to the previews to give you a better idea of what the skins would look like in the game. The little statis bar face/sounds/exploding death icons have finally been added to the previews. A legend explaining them has been on the site since it was first created, but the icons themselves have been conspicuously absent. Well they’re here at last. The new previews have one more convenient feature. Clicking on the animated sprite in the preview window will now download the skin. Hows that for an improvement?
Now
this is more like it!
A sprite basics tutorial has been added to the tutorial section, along with the long awaited skin making tutorial. I actually wrote it back in October, but I haven’t been able to add it to the emporium until now.
The links in the Tools section have been fixed.
Finally, we shouldn’t forget the spiffy new graphics that have been added to the site. New Epidermis Emporium logos created at flamingtext.com have been added to the top of every page. I have also created new menu bar graphics, and a skin background motif (derived from DooM skin textures) for the skin pages. The old square skin preview buttons have been replaced with 3D rendered buttons that are much more pleasent to look at (They glow when you move the cursor over them too.). There is a lot of new eye candy to look at on the site. Enjoy!
Oh! I almost forgot! A links page has finally been added to the site. That has been a long time in coming, but here it is at last.
It may be several weeks or even months, due to the firewall, before I get a chance to update again (I am able to update now, purely because a friend across town is letting me upload through his machine.). Hopefully, this will be enough to tide you over until then.
—Mark Quinn (a.k.a. Boingo)
Friday August 14, 2000
A new look for the emporium
I have been working on and off on the new version of the site during the last week. It is not precisely what I had in mind, but it is a great improvement over the old look. The site is now broken up into several pages with navigation links at the top of each page. Longer pages also have nav links at the bottom as well. There is also a new site logo, and pages designed for tutorials have been added (although I am still working on the tutorials themselves).
The new format is not perfect, and suffers from the fact that it has been rushed to an extent. Unfortunately, I am moving at the end of next week, and will be off the net until I am set up with a new isp, so this is the version I am going to use.
I hope you find the new set up to your liking.
Tuesday August 4, 2000
The Epidermis Emporium site is now at newdoom.com
(originally posted on the old Legacy forum)
Yes. It's true. The Epidermis Emporium is now online at newdoom.com. If you try to go to the old sites (Furtunecity or Geocities) you will find a little page anouncing the move. You will also see the the sites are going to be put to good use in the near future.
It's nice to be at newdoom.com. There is only one problem.
The current format of the EE page was only meant as a temporary format while the page was originally being set up. It's not the kind of ratty old looking page I really want at its new location. The long lists on a single page format just doesn't cut it on a classy site like newdoom.com, so I would like to ask everyone for their input on how to fix up the new site so that it is worthy of its new home.
I would most like any suggestions for categories I can seperate the skins into, but anything you can think of would be fine.
Thanks for all of your support. Let's make
the EE site the best Legacy skins resource on the net!
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