Archive for January, 2008

Iz borken

I just noticed that the lower comic navigation buttons don’t work in Internet Explorer. Sorry about that, guys. I’m working on figuring out why.

CURRENT MOOD: Acid2

When the gun of necessity is held to your head…

All right, I’ve got a temporary fix in there. Temporary. I traded the nav buttons being unclickable for part of the site’s logo and a sliver of the sidebar ad being unclickable. I’ll find a real fix sooner or later.

CURRENT MOOD: Love and Total Freaking Joy

It presses words!

If you’re reading this, then the new Wordpress/Comicpress powered site has at long last gone live!

Yes, you read that right: TMABB.com is now a Comicpress site. Doesn’t look like one, does it? You’re probably used to the simple header with simple back/forward arrows right above the comic when you come to a Comicpress site, right? Well, truth be told, the only parts of the theme that I made use of were the database functions provided in the Comicpress theme. I threw everything else out, redid the design from scratch, and even added a few database functions of my own.

A lot of discussion has taken place recently around Tyler Martin’s webcomic-oriented Comicpress theme for Wordpress. You can probably thank Scott Kurtz’s recent adoption of Wordpress on his site for that.

I find many people are reluctant to take a stab at creating a Wordpress/Comicpress site because they feel that working with Wordpress is very difficult as far as customization is concerned. Apart from the robustness of the whole system, part of my reasoning for trying to make a site with Wordpress was to prove that even a complex site design like TMABB.com’s can be done easily in it. In fact, any site design can be made to work with it if you’re willing to take the time to dig in.

All in all, this new site took probably two days of straight coding to implement, plus a few more afternoons to get all of the strips into the system (which can be scripted, anyway). I already had the site design, so it was just a matter of feeding that into my Wordpress theme. That probably took four hours to get right, tops. I’d likely be lots faster on my second try.

The big task was implementing TMABB.com’s other functionality, namely the twin comic nav bars, the drop-down archive listing, and the Current Chapter link. That was definitely difficult, and I’ll admit that I would probably have not been able to do it if I didn’t have the programming chops. The code made use of some database queries that would probably seem weird if you’ve never worked with a database before, but it all makes sense if you stare at my code for a few minutes.

Anyway, my point is, there’s no reason not to use Wordpress for your next site redesign. In fact, if you only want to use the comic archiving functionality that’s already in the Comicpress theme, you’ll find that making your site work with Wordpress is a lot easier than you’re probably expecting.

Eventually, if I can find the time, I’d like to put together a tutorial detailing the process that I went through to implement what ended up becoming a fairly complex Wordpress theme. For now, though, if you’re interested in doing a Wordpress site, I found this article to be extremely helpful in allaying my fears about Wordpress. It really isn’t that hard if you’ve already coded a site from scratch before!

CURRENT MOOD: Pulsing Knives Throw Strife to the Turmoils

Total radness

The site is down and I have no idea why. I also have no idea why I’m saying this, as you wouldn’t be able to read it anyway.

CURRENT MOOD: Line Breaks

I believe in magic

And now it’s working again. I still have no idea why it stopped working in the first place.

CURRENT MOOD: Avada Goddanged Kedavra

You have 4 skill points to spend on upgrades

Aha. Turns out my host is upgrading the box that TMABB.com is hosted on. The issue might crop up again while they’re working on it, but they say the upgrade should only take a couple more hours. Sorry for the downtime, lads and lasses!

CURRENT MOOD: Tagalog