Submission Box

Would you like to see your own writing or work featured on The Patch Bay? We’re open for submissions! Please read over the general guidelines in my announcement post and get in touch at ethan.gates (at) hey.com

Alternatively, have an idea for a topic or tutorial that we could cover? A single burning question that’s always bugged you about [X] video format or [Y] software?

This page’s comments are open for any and all suggestions – as broad or as specific as you like. I’ve certainly got my own ideas for writing or soliciting future posts, but leave a reply and let me know what would YOU like to see covered on The Patch Bay!!

4 thoughts on “Submission Box”

  1. Hey Ethan,

    Any chance you could add some sort of overarching table of contents that would list out all of your posts? I’ve found that some of your older (still golden) posts are a little difficult to locate.

    Thanks! Let’s catch up more soon. Hope you’re doing well.

    1. Hey Ben!

      Yes, I was thinking about this recently as well. At the bare minimum I’d like to make the Category links on the sidebar direct just to a list of post titles, rather than displaying the whole posts – since as you say, it buries older content under my (lengthy 😂) newer stuff.

      I’ll look more into WordPress widgets and plugins and see what I can come up with! Thanks for the suggestion.

  2. Hey Ethan! I’m revisiting your blog for teaching purposes, and I wanted to see if you have any thoughts on preservation of flash projects. We lost so many great interactive, web-based projects because flash is no longer working. Most have no plans of being remediated at all, while others have pending preservation grants.

    1. Hi Marina! Flash is a really interesting topic and at one point I was in a discussion with Jacob Zaborowski (MIAP class of ’17) to have him do a guest post here on the blog as a follow-up to his thesis (https://miap.hosting.nyu.edu/program/student_work/2017spring/17s_Zaborowski_thesis_grading_copy_y.pdf), which investigated this question using Homestar Runner as a case study. I can try to reach out and see if he’s still interested; I do know that there have been some major technical advances in this area just in the past couple years, including Ruffle, an open-source Flash player emulator, and the various web archiving tools created by the Webrecorder project (like the oldweb.today page, which lets you browse live web sites with emulated web browsers!)

      https://ruffle.rs
      https://webrecorder.net
      https://oldweb.today

      I am sure there are still a lot of gaps though – as with many emulation projects, the Ruffle community seems very video game-focused, which is obviously only one part of the story of Flash on the web. And the tools above only work either if: 1) the Flash-based site is still live on the web (even if now inaccessible to modern browsers), or 2) archives get access to the original source files, neither of which is guaranteed, particularly when it comes to artists’ sites that I bet you’re thinking of. I would also be interested how/if the landscape has changed just in the past year, since Adobe finally, officially, fully switched off Flash at the end of 2020.

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