Through midnight (Pacific Time) tomorrow you can get one of my archival prints for free, if you buy two more at the regular price. Oh! The savings!

This applies to my Retropolis archival prints and also to the prints from The Celtic Art Works. It’s a good deal, if you’ve been procrastinating. Come to think of it… it’s still a good deal even if you’re not procrastinating.

So, okay, that happened. It turns out that if you design something that you hope people will enjoy and play with and spread, and then you let the link go free out in the world… they enjoy it, and play with it, and spread it.

Now normally when I share a link to something of mine a few people will look at it and a small percentage of those few people will share the link with their friends. So yesterday I decided to open up the Pulp-O-Mizer to a few more people by posting the link publicly because, really, who pays any attention to me, anyway?

Well. Thousands of pageviews later I guess I have more data than I can really analyze (though mostly, things look pretty excellent). My tweet of yesterday got retweeted by several people who are more, I dunno, twittified than I am; that went on to Google+ with a surprising amount of response; and I couldn’t let my Facebook followers get outdone, could I? So I invited them in, and now the Pulp-O-Mizer has passed its unscheduled stress test with flying colors. And that’s neat. Pulp-O-Mizer images are already turning up in blogs and fora and at Tumblr and in other places.

There have been very few errors, judging by what I’ve found in the temp folders. I can’t be positive about their causes because the sheer number of page views is making it hard for me to match a file to a particular session (and its browser). But I do have a couple of things to look at.

In the meantime, I finally admitted to myself that the thing is out in the world now and so I cobbled together some changes at the Thrilling Tales site so that the Pulp-O-Mizer would be accessible through normal channels. Which I guess means I launched it. Much to my own surprise!

If you have feedback or problems with the Pulp-O-Mizer you can add them to the comments on this post. Note that off-topic comments are likely to be deleted, even if they’re brilliant.

A few notes to get you started:

When you just want to combine images to get something that you like it’s a good idea to turn all the Text Areas off. That’s why I put the On/Off buttons right in the title bar for each Text Area: you can turn them off even when the menu’s been minimized.

Look at the Presets! They’re there to give you illustrated examples of things you can do.

If you run into trouble (especially when you try to make a Pulp-O-Mized product) your first step should be to look at the manual at the bottom of the Pulp-O-Mizer page. The “Browser Compatibility” and “Trouble Shooting” chapters are especially useful.

Although it’s explained in the Users’ Guide I will mention here again that Pulp-O-Mizer images are not available for use in commercial products (like books, eBooks, or tea cozies). In any case the images you render from the Pulp-O-Mizer page are too low in resolution to be suitable for that kind of thing.

I see now that I let my blog lie fallow for an entire month, which is unusual. But I’ve been hard at work on the PULP-O-MIZER pretty much all of this time… apart from driving through a snowstorm and getting knocked on my backside by the flu for a few days.

By the time the holidays rolled around I had all of my intended features in and working and I’d also been through a series of optimizations and changes to get PULP-O-MIZED product creation working on the iPad and (I hope) on Android and Windows RT tablets. I haven’t had any way to test those yet, even by proxy. I could use some Android tablet and Windows RT testers, in case that sounds like you. Just let me know.

(In fact I’d be happy to have more testers of any description. I’m not going to give a public link to the PULP-O-MIZER just yet but if you’d like to test it, let me know and we’ll see if we can make that happen.)

Long before those features were all in, anyway, I could see that I wanted some things to change. Most of this involved rearranging and reworking the text entry controls but it also meant adding some new features like selectable typefaces and colors, along with an on/off switch for the drop shadow behind the text elements. So once my brain had recovered from the flu I got to work on those. They’re in now, and they look like this:

There’s another feature that I’m reluctant to add and there’s one more optimization that I may tackle even though it might create some new problems. So I’m trying to make my mind up about a couple of things and just working on new image layers while those issues get sorted out. There’s the documentation to finish, too. So I still have a pretty full plate, and the whole question of where the PULP-O-MIZER will make its home is kind of up in the air, too.

I’ve been hoping to unleash the PULP-O-MIZER on a hapless world by the end of the month: but we’ll see. I want it to be very polished before that happens and there’s no way to be certain exactly when that’ll be. But soon! Or soonish! Or soon-like!

Something like that.