[FrugalHaunts]

Hi all!

I've lurked here for years and just really started collecting what I need for doing my own home haunt.

One thing I've noticed is it takes a lot of research and going through old posts to find what I am looking for to accomplish certain things or find certain items or sales.

I've thrown together a web page over the last week to compile some of what I've found and also create some new tutorial content. I've knocked out the 3 easy tutorials I planned and will be working on the 3 hard ones as I can. I didn't know creating that kind of content was so time consuming.

I also compiled pictures from a lot of my local stores of what Halloween stuff is available. I am mostly concerned with prop type stuff and not so much general decorations. There are still a few more local stores I'll add in the future, like Party City and At_Home. I won't bother with Spirit as they have good pictures on their web site and there is just too much to post. You can see it on the "gallery" pages.

I've tossed in a LINKS page with just a few to start with as well as a DOWNLOADS page. I don't want to clutter either up with too much but would like to know what is important to include.

The site is also formatted pretty well for use on a phone browser.

Is there even a need for this type of website or am I wasting my time or duplicating something already done?

I would really like to get feedback before I go farther or ditch it altogether if there is no need.

Thanks!

www.frugalhaunts.com

Edit: I also plan to include links to a lot of the other great tutorials by people on here and on youtube. Things like how to modify a skeleton to look like a corpse and creating moving props from wiper motors come to mind. I need the best of the best.

 

[chain]

Checked out the tutorials page and I like it. Just enough information to give me an idea of what I'm looking at before I go into one. I dig it.

 

[Frankie's Girl]

From what I saw, this site has promise.

There used to be several master list/projects pages over the years that went to the web graveyard. I do think there is a need for a site that can list/organize/categorize great projects and builds.

MonsterList is still hanging out there but hasn't been updated in a dog's age and it contains so many outdated or just plain borked links that it is sad and frustrating to go through.

We lost Haunt Project completely when Perfessor Evil died unexpectedly and his family was unwilling/unable to pass management of it on to any interested haunters to carry it on. This was a tragedy both because of the loss of an amazing man and haunter, but also because his site was such a gift to haunters everywhere - beautifully organized and collected PHOTOS and was curated quite well.

 

[Ladyfrog]

Looks good! I like the pictures of available merch at the different stores. That would help me a lot as I live 60 miles away from just about everything. It would be nice to know who has what.

 

[FrugalHaunts]

Thanks for the feedback!

I wish I had seen the Haunt Project. Was it called hauntproject.com and can I look it up on the waybackmachine or something to see it? What years was it up?

I'm 50 but have a 4 and 6 year old and intend to be into haunts for at least 15 to 20 years if I can.

 

[Ghost of Spookie]

Nicely laid out and I miss sites like this. Haunt Project and Monster List were both very popular project build sites back in their day and I remember being stunned when we lost Perfessor Evil, too young. I think Frugal Haunts would fill a long missed void. The only current sites that come to mind similar to those would be the blog sites of Dave Lowe’s site and Stolloween.

 

[DandyBrit]

Brilliant idea to do this. Will be very useful.

 

[kuroneko]

Looking good so far! It's great to see another haunter stepping up and filling the void left by the loss of Haunt Project.

 

[Frankie's Girl]

Yup and it does exist in the Wayback Machine's archives. I'm not sure when he started it, but it was well before the 2000s so be kind about the layout and look considering it was a product of its time. It was great because he had unapproved links area where you could see what folks had submitted, but he personally approved and organized each posting and was constantly out there himself trying to find the best stuff...

Around 2007-2013 is the heyday.

Thanks for the feedback!

I wish I had seen the Haunt Project. Was it called hauntproject.com and can I look it up on the waybackmachine or something to see it? What years was it up?

I'm 50 but have a 4 and 6 year old and intend to be into haunts for at least 15 to 20 years if I can.

 

[bobby2003]

If you are going to do links to offsite tutorials you need to think about creating an offline pdf copy of the tutorial for safe keeping. The one thing I notice about older Halloween websites, and some of the ones I pull up in waybackmachine because they are now defunct, is the number of dead links in their links/tutorial sections, or in their own tutorials when they link to another site as reference. I've even noticed that Monster List has that issue for a few links. If you have a pdf backup, and If the sites ever vanish, and eventually they might (look at garage of evil for example which sputtered and died earlier this year) with a pdf version you will have something to still link to.

 

[RCIAG]

If you are going to do links to offsite tutorials you need to think about creating an offline pdf copy of the tutorial for safe keeping. The one thing I notice about older Halloween websites, and some of the ones I pull up in waybackmachine because they are now defunct, is the number of dead links in their links/tutorial sections, or in their own tutorials when they link to another site as reference. I've even noticed that Monster List has that issue for a few links. If you have a pdf backup, and If the sites ever vanish, and eventually they might (look at garage of evil for example which sputtered and died earlier this year) with a pdf version you will have something to still link to.

THIS!!

There's nothing quite so frustrating as when you find your dream project on a site with a list like this & then click & you get an error of some sort. That's happened to me more than once over at Monster List when I was first really getting into trying to make bigger things.

 

[Ghost of Spookie]

Disappearing photos and links are definitely a problem even here. By people not posting their photos to an album on Halloween Forum that can be linked to from posts here all they have to do is delete photos from their album elsewhere or close their hosting account and poof, no photo. Then of course you have photo hosting sites like Photobucket who essentially pull the rug out from a lot of users who had used their photo hosting service. It's really hard to do a project when an important step is shown in a photo and then it's not there. I think personally it's a mistake to allow outside sources of photos, but that's me.

Early on when I saw a "?" instead of a photo, I started saving project pages that I was interested in and might want to look back to someday as pdfs. Wish I would have done more especially for sites like Skull and Bone. Have their home page, clothing, corpsing and lighting sections saved. Loved that website, and the site was so beautifully laid out. I so loved Miss Rose's cemetary...to die for! I was so inspired by their haunt that on our way south on 101 during a vacation I had my husband drive by their house in Atascadero, kind of hoping they would be outside and I could let them know how much I had loved their work from a far.

Back to pdfs. The formatting on many of the pdfs I saved off is atrocious but glad I at least have them to read over so highly encourage people to do the same if they come across a project they might want to tackle someday.

 

[bobby2003]

...

Back to pdfs. The formatting on many of the pdfs I saved off is atrocious but glad I at least have them to read over so highly encourage people to do the same if they come across a project they might want to tackle someday.

The same here. My thought i the same as yours. Something is better than nothing.

As a side note FrugalHaunts, I really wonder if you shouldn't be doing this site in Wordpress instead of GoDaddy's website builder. It might be easier to maintain, and it would make it more portable in case you ever leave Godaddy's hosting, which I think you will eventually find is terrible. As someone who develops websites I would reccomend it over website builder and if you want to go that route that is a change better done sooner than later because I think ti will be hard to migrate once you have a lot of content.

 

[90Moneypit]

I'm liking it! I'm interested (as I'm sure a lot of folks here are) in that 8 USB hub controller for sure. I thinks it's a fantastic idea for a 'one stop shop' site dedicated to compiling all the data (or even just sites) for the budget home haunter. It's a little daunting to keep 30 tabs open and remember what is for what in the Favorites list on my browser. As Frankie's Girl said, a lot of information gets lost or is a series of dead links the average person can't or won't track down through the way back machine. Who wouldn't love a site with store discount calendar to boot! Oh, and a nice listing (that gets the occasional update) of parts like 2.1 channel amplifiers under $30 paired with a tutorial of making drop on 'landscape rocks' for your speakers out of fabric, great stuff, and a KFC bucket/cardboard/dollar store bowl? ;D There's just so many 'solo project' sites (that do really good jobs, mind you) I run across once then spend weeks trying to figure out what rabbit hole led me to them at 3am while I was looking up something else completely.

 

[FrugalHaunts]

Wow guys, lots of great feedback here. I will definitely try to archive projects I link to in order to resurrect them if they die (with author's rite to ask me to take it down of course).

I actually started on Wordpress but was finding it too time consuming for the simple clean look I am starting with. I really wanted to get it live in some form before Halloween. I'll still be scrambling to get more up there before the big day too. Once Halloween passes, I'll be able to take my time migrating to Wordpress and spend the year getting it in good shape for the next Halloween season.

For those interested in the last 3 tutorials I am trying to finish, I can give a quick summary. I have the links to the products I use on the site's links page already.

The 8 channel PC controlled USB relay is about $33 after international shipping charges, and it can take a few weeks to get. It is here:

http://denkovi.com/usb-eight-channel-relay-board-for-automation - USB PC relay board

Basically, you can send command line prompts to it when motion is detected in a program like Ispy. You can use any android phone with camera as an IP camera using this Android app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam

You can set up zones in Ispy that trigger the alert to go off and execute the command to the relays. You could also trigger wav or mp3 sounds or videos. The best is to use VLC as a command line instruction because VLC allows a lot of control for multiple instances and hiding it etc. The best thing using an IP camera over a USB camera is that you can add it multiple times and set a trigger zone for each instance, thus allowing different props in different locations to go off based on where someone walks within view of a single camera (cell phone). The other tutorial will be how to get 8 channels of sound from one 7.1 USB sound device and use Audacity to create the 8 discreet channels.

While more than what I will be doing is probably possible, I will at least demonstrate that with one PC, one or two (or more) android phones, the 8 channel USB relay board, and 7.1 sound device, you can easily control 8 different props and 8 different sound effects from 8 different speaker location based on the movement of people around your haunt. Depending on how many video outputs you have, you could also trigger multiple video projections.

I'll discuss that more in the appropriate forums once I get my tutorials done, but since time is running out I wanted to give a basic run down for those interested.

Thanks for all the suggestions and encouragement!