The Birth of Creation in Digital
Recent Happenings at CiD
Creation in Digital (www.creationindigital.com) is a Christian, digital graphics community consisting of public galleries, forums, an industry news section, and resource and links archives. The purpose of Creation in Digital (CiD) is to provide a place for artists to fellowship, be inspired by others? work and learn more about the graphic arts, all this in a community without all the worldliness attached. Most important is that it is a community that gives witness to the glory of God.
CiD was officially founded on October 28th, 2001. The real beginning, however, was several months earlier. I was a fairly active member in the game graphics communities at that time and while I had learned much from frequenting their forums, they weren?t communities where a Christian could fellowship with others. I felt God leading me to leave those communities so I did. However, I continued to feel a yearning for the involvement that I used to have in graphics. I searched in vain for an existing community with Christian ideals. After several days searching, praying, and considering several options, I was led to the conclusion that a new community should be built.
Not knowing much about server side scripting and the power it bestowed, I created CiD v1.0 using HTML and JavaScript. I started by adding my graphics works at that time. As CiD began to receive traffic, I manually added submissions from others. After a while, I knew that there had to be a better way to organize, accept submissions, spend less time and work more efficiently. I soon found out about ASP and PHP. A friend, 3e3c3e @ assortedthoughts.com, set up the basic database structure for me and integrated it in with my old site?s design. I modified it according to what was needed as the site grew, but soon ran out of bandwidth. CiD v2.x can still be viewed here: www27.brinkster.com/cidigital
CiD at that time had a number of visitors, but it wasn?t popular enough to make me think about buying a hosting package and a domain name just yet, especially as most free services were still fairly generous. I came across a PHP gallery script (Exhibit Engine) and decided to customize it for CiD v3.0, turning the script from a showcase to more of a show & tell. I still was having to add each submission myself, though it was a lot easier than before; as more people submitted art, the more time I spent adding it. With all of this being done manually, I was becoming less enchanted with CiD.
Andrew (CWM Community Member BlazeQ)
http://www.creationindigital... starting his computer education with programming, BlazeQ is an artist at heart. He quickly dropped Java and C for LightWave and Photoshop. He has participated in several game dev projects and currently builds websites.
You can visit him online at his website: www.creationindigital.com