While most of the social features are done now, there will soon be even more for members to play around with. Personal data are being recorded into the database and will recognized as tags. At the same time people can associate articles from their site or write descriptions for these tags. I’m also planning to add the ability to associate images from the exhibit with tags. But there will be more about that soon, for now check out your own new profile, and other features under interact ;)

Our site is based on a community. As you probably already know it revolves around asian culture, however we do not have one specific theme. Our aim is to form a community where information as well as opinions are exchanged. With the recent addition of temple of zen this means you’re not only limited to writing articles here for us, but you can also stream content from your blog to our site! If you want to find out how I suggest you go offer to temple of zen right now and take a quick look.

Working together it was in the end of February that Project Zen saw first light, and with the help of members mostly originating from Anime Layer we rapidly got off the ground and quickly grew to be a nice community and big source for scans. Soon Project Zen enjoyed attention from outsiders as well. During all this Project Zen grew bigger by the day offering new features and updates (mostly graphical at first). In our first year we introduced the so called fruit flavors, such as orange, strawberry and kiwi. They were brightly colored themes each resembling the colors of a fruit. At the same time Red put a lot more effort to make Project Zen more unique and gave the site her own smilies (some of them can now be found in other communities I believe). At the end of the year Konekochan (Leanne) offered her help with a special christmas theme.

In between this first year we’ve switched hosts (often with help of Jarod) and were shortly even hosted by Ewdi from Anime Online. At the end of that period Project Zen experienced it’s first long downtime. It was then that we were offered hosting by Maxa (Max), he was even generous enough to provide IRC hosting so that we could host our IRC channel on our server. Thanks to that we also meeted and greeted some new faces who joined the crew. Towards the end of 2002 however a rapid grow of bandwidth usage forced us to move our server yet again. This was probably one of the longest downtimes the site had, yet at the same time first steps were being made for a huge update at Project Zen.

After almost half a year we managed to get ourselves back online followed by a series of updates. We called this Project Zen version 2. Most notably there were changes in the gallery, interface and some modifications made to the forum and we welcome a new administrator: Nat! The styles were now not just limited to fruit flavors, but fruits and drinks were also featured, additionaly cute pixel icons made by both Red and Konekochan for various themes. Having decided to reduce traffic the gallery was now restricted to scans only. However the forum grew bigger (and more chaotic) by the day. Members of all kinds contributed, shared and leeched images, manga’s and more. This led us to once again switch host and so we finally ended up being hosted by Zerophyte (Chris). As a result of all the traffic Project Zen invented it’s own anti leeching system that would only allow active members to access the gallery. Spammers became active and in no time moderators had a huge job cleaning up the forums. It was also then when Project Zen finally ended up getting hacked because we forgot to update the phpBB software which we faithfully used over the years.

After that Project Zen has never really returned and so other similar communities rose up to replace and take over most of what Project Zen was about. Some of it’s members stopped altogether but most have transferred to either Animepaper (set up by former Project Zen members Bantam and Nat) or Mini Tokyo or both. Both sites still exist today and are probably much bigger now then Project Zen ever was. And so now we open up for anyone who likes to meet up or be part of a fun community.

As a note: This article was written by what’s on top of my head, so if I forgot to mention anything or anyone (sorry) memorable feel free to leave your comments. As mentioned in the article there have been quite some people contributing, here are some of those names (in no particular order).

Project Zens good ole’ Crew: Dias, meg, w00tazn, Red, Cynical126 (Abstract Anime), Angel, Nat, Bantam, Tal, Almighty-Baka (previously Ponder Not), Koneko, zerophyte, wanjuro (shortly) and I

IRC idlers (that were not crew): sword, trance/elf, Phong, Sayumi, Mitsu, Raiji, Rax/paul, Dahak and Oni

Major Scan contributors: dev_Kimiko, shinta, Kei Kurosu, Yamashi, Zero, Yaone, andrsn52a, _tsunami, queen_akasha, aila, mimiru (both Nat and Cynical have been huge contributors as well but were already listed as part of the crew)

I’ve started taking first steps on setting up a new gallery. I know I mentioned before that PZ isn’t going to be specifically about scans, while this does hold some truth, that’s not the full truth. I’m planning to broden our gallery by supporting many more categories. I won’t be too specific about those yet but I plan on adding photo’s as well. High resolution photo’s and of-course art. This will be a new focus I’m hoping that will draw your attention. That also means that the gallery will be a nice source to spice up your desktop too.

Ok so enough about that. What can we see now? Well like I promised I’ve been doing a little work on the forum, it isn’t fully done but I think it’s good enough so that you can access it. The design however is temporary and still subject to change. If it won’t be fully changed. In the header you can see our PZ mascot though so be sure to at least take a look, she was created awhile ago by Leanne. For the full wallpaper version of her click here.

Ok that’s enough talk for now, for more goto the forum !

First of all I’d like to clarify that during the past months Project Zen wasn’t exactly dead, although we have had some technical difficulties with the server. It was then that we last our frontpage and the (small) group of members that stopped visiting the forum.

So why bring it back, all I can say is I just felt like it. And step by step I plan to take this further. Currently the site has no integration with the forums but that would be one of the first steps I am about to take. I would also like to take the oppertunity to thank Zerophyte with his help in hosting us, and, from what I last heard, giving us a promising future. So where are we going this time you might wonder.

Well for those of you who were last on the forum my plans haven’t changed much. I would like to give this place a new face by featuring a sort of online magazine. That means I would like to invite anyone interested to come here and join us in writing front page news. That means articles, interviews, news perhaps even tutorials (written in a more professional way then say the forums). Ofcourse this would be revolving most of Project Zen’s old themes.

The core of Project Zen however will always be it’s community, and I still have plans for bringing it together in a somewhat new way. Those who have visited the forums before have experienced a bit of it, but thanks to development in the forum software we use much more is possible now. Throughout all of this new development, navigation and fast loading pages will always be a first consideration. There will be more on this soon!

PS. If you cared and noticed our tags, they aren’t working yet. And about the forum, I’ll plug it again soon, it’s still there at it’s old addres however.