March 2023 update

14. 4. 2023
Europa pony

… in April, yeah. This took longer than expected because life happens again and the con season is getting closer every day!

Another event has a complete archive published: BUCKcon was one of the biggest brony events in Europe and until it ended in 2016, it was largely visited not just by European but also by American bronies. Also, the Summer Sun Celebration music festival as a part of BUCKcon left many great memories for all of us who visited it.

This event has a large archive of videos which took a long time to process, so aside from publishing, there are only a few bug fixes, info corrections to the website, and event calendar updates.

Until the next event archive is published, enjoy another blast from the past!

BUCK

February 2023 update

26. 2. 2023
Europa pony

Monthly updates… hmm, maybe I can keep it up, but no promises. But still better than the much longer silence before. So… what’s new here so far?

  • The Events Calendar and Conventions pages have been updated with new events and recent plan changes
  • Conventions descriptions have been updated (a lot changed since I wrote those 3 years ago) and EuroBronyCon was moved to ended events
  • A short About this page section has been added.
  • The contact form has been moved to Google Forms and the Contact page has a few new details and also a small self-promo (mainly to explain why somepony started to build this website in the first place).
  • But mainly: the complete content for the BronyFair convention has been added – including 10 photo galleries that were never published before!
  • The project stage is still beta and development (as well as adding new content) of this website continues
  • Oh and years’ content overview update. So here… have all of the events years published here so far, right in this post 🙂

BronyFair

BronyDays

Czequestria

January 2023 update

26. 1. 2023
Europa pony

Almost 4 months since the first public beta and no announcements…

Yeah, I’m not a big fan of “update every week” in the beta stage. But there are a lot of changes (especially content updates), just not on the front door site. Let’s see what happened here in the meantime:

Event-by-year content – photo galleries and videos

The biggest change: I’ve used Czequestria and Brony Days to create the event-by-year page design and test the whole process. Check those links and let me know if you like them (contact me here)!

You can find 3 types of materials there:

  • links – default option, if materials exist online
  • reuploads – vanished galleries and videos, restored from earlier backups
  • upload of new materials – published for the very first time

The first group is easy – link for the photo gallery or embedded video (rarely links to videos from sites, that require login).

The second group refers to once-uploaded and now missing or otherwise publicly inaccessible content – either from former platforms (like G+), abandoned private webpages, canceled accounts on existing platforms (like YT, FB), or deleted / inaccessible content because of changed conditions of the platform (limiting of free use, closed accounts, etc.). They say the Internet does not forget, well… it does a lot. These were reuploaded here or on YT.

The last group is surprisingly big because some people just take photos/record videos and rarely publish them (including me). So I got the originals, sorted them, and upload them here or on YT. Yeah… that’s thousands of photos. Doing this was the most time-consuming part of the whole process. Also necessary, if they were ever be published and not forgotten. Of course, with the consent of the authors – this is the part, that took a lot of time too.

New uploads and reuploads

Photo galleries are hosted here on the site – photos are converted to a size that won’t ruin your data plan if you have it (max 2048px width or height). Videos are hosted on a dedicated YT channel https://www.youtube.com/@bronieseu – all new video uploads and reuploads are sorted into playlists per event year, or in a dedicated playlist (if needed).

The whole site size is now 1,8 GB and this is just a start – luckily, there is plenty of space on the server. Next time, I’ll prepare detailed statistics, but so far:

  • reuploaded panel recordings, plus 2 reuploaded and 2 completely new (never published) galleries from BronyDays 2013-2015
  • 9 reuploaded and 15 completely new (never published) galleries from Czequestria 2014-2022
  • dozens of new short videos from both and few reuploads

Of course, uploading to YT includes descriptions with original author credits.

Event Calendar, fixes, and new content

An important part of this site is the now updated Event Calendar of brony events – so far limited to European conventions (which are much harder to find, because of a language barrier). Yes, there are plans to expand this list also to meetups and events outside Europe, but first things first – this is still the beta stage, right? Also, I’m just one pony, creating and maintaining this whole thing.

Many small fixes have been done, mainly for cell phone browsers and there is still a lot to be fixed for sure. Static pages (About, Links, etc.) are to be added and Contact is still pretty basic. Not to mention all the materials (about 2TB) waiting in my archive to be published.

But yeah… this is a solid start! Let me know if you like the page so far! Aside from posting this to my Twitter @Jamis_bro, this will be also my first post on Mastodon Jamis@equestria.social (which I don’t have time to use, because of my life, and work on this site).

If not online, then see you at European brony events! (look for Gala Fluttershy 😉 )

Overview galleries for initial con list – DONE!

23. 2. 2022
Europa pony

Phew… all the galleries for the European convention overview pages currently described on this page are finished and published! This was a lot of work, mostly because there were a lot of materials to go through and select the representative ones.

Let’s take Hearth’s Warming Con as an example:

  • my event archive contains ~4800 items (photos, videos, graphics designs – from all 4 events)
  • selection to choose from: ~2700 photos (where I was able to reach authors and they agreed with publishing their materials here on site)
  • final representative selection: 30 photos and 6 mascot designs

Photos and designs are grouped into categories corresponding to the paragraphs in the event description – there is a 6 items limit per category to keep it event description relevant (large galleries are planned for event-by-years pages).

Every photo has a description (metadata if you want) – short description, long description (if applicable), year of the event, and author. In some cases, it took some time to find out the corresponding metadata (local VA guests’ names, etc.) and the authors of some graphics designs remain unknown to me, despite an extensive search.

So yeah… the initial ready-to-publish version is finally done! YAY! Now the static pages, calendar, reporting system… and then finally open beta.