Hoo boy, a lot of stuff got done over here at Hindrances to Progress HQ last week.

The new site is done. I finished putting the interchunks together Wednesday night, it’s all set to go live, yay. The new layout looks fantastic, and the new comic format is going to look HUGE, yet still fit on your monitor with minimal scrolling. The whole thing is way more streamlined. It just feels better in your hand. It all goes live Monday morning at 12:01am, Eastern Standard! I think you guys are really gonna like it. Did I mention the Current Chapter functionality is actually implemented this time?

The book is DONE. The frickdanged book is done! I did my second-to-final proofread last night, and I plan to send the PDF off to the printer today. After that, I’ll just need to read through the final proof, point my thumb to the sky, and then start selling! I can’t tell you how glad I am to be done with the thing. I had no idea making a book out of material I’ve already written could be so time consuming.

So, here we are at the end of the fillers! I hope you guys liked them. I’m especially happy with this week’s strip. I’ve started drawing new comics for Chapter 9 now. It’s going to be nuts! Oh man!

Remember, the new update schedule will be Mondays and Thursdays! Don’t forget!

CURRENT MOOD: Four Times the Journey: Don’t Splurge the Vibes

I fill up my cats’ bowls every other day. They’ve got big bowls. Also, their names are Starbuck and Apollo, which makes me an extremely cool dude.

I took down the content on Hindrances.com last night. The forums will remain on Hindrances’ server for now, because I don’t feel like going to the trouble to transfer them over to TMABB.com. If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed on Hindrances, you’re gonna want to switch over to Tmabb’s feed.

So it turns out, I did indeed come up with another lesson learned after I finished last week’s newsie:

5) Remember several months ago when I announced that the book would be released on December 3rd? Yeah, probably shouldn’t have said that. Danged optimism. Believe me, I want this thing to be done very badly, and I’m close. All that’s left is the cover, but I want to make sure I do a really super-crazy-good job on it, so I’m not going to rush just to cut my release date back. Anyway, what have I learned? Don’t announce the release date until you’ve got a proof (from the printers!) in your hands.

Now that TMABB.com Relaunch Time is getting close, I have no choice but to set the book aside for a couple weekends so I can get to work on the new site. I don’t expect this particular design to take very long, and the first bullet on my List of Things That I’m Keeping In Mind explains why:

1) I’m keeping the same color scheme. I was thinking at first that I would do something a little darker with a bit more contrast, but that was before I realized that I’ve had the current design throughout the entire time that I’ve been taking the comic seriously. There’s a bit of a brand recognition in these burgundy-and-Irish-creme bubbles now. However, the nice thing about that is, I don’t have to design any new graphics, which will save me a lot of time (although I am converting everything to GIF, because I’m tired of how much browsers mistreat PNGs and I don’t feel like gamma-stripping every single PNG on the site).

2) The comic pane, though, needs a little more emphasis, so the background on that will be white, instead of Irish creme.

3) More of the comic needs to be above the fold, which, in web design terms at least, means above the point where the reader needs to start scrolling (in newsprint, above the fold has a more literal meaning – above the middle of the page, where the paper gets folded for delivery). I’ve accomplished that.

4) Also above the fold, a nice, big leaderboard ad. I’ve got it placed in the upper-right, where most people will at least see it subconsciously, even if they don’t process it consciously. That way, the ads are getting exposure without being intrusive. Common practice, I know, but there’s a lot of psychology involved in that placement. You’d be surprised.

5) A real logo is needed. That’s done. I was already using it for the book. Another thing is, I like how Kris at Starslip has a super-quick description of the comic in his site’s logo. I’m going to do something similar for TMABB.com’s logo (not for the book’s title logo, though). I figure, it’s not easy to figure out what the comic is about when you first get here, so this should help make new readers stick.

6) Less stuff. The new design will be a lot less busy, with a great deal more emphasis on the comic and a little less emphasis on the news blog. You’ll definitely see both, but the comic is going to punch you in the face with its mighty fist of attention, and then it will gently guide your eyes to the news.

As far as layout is concerned, that’s pretty much what I’ve got on my mind. In terms of the backend stuff, though, there’s also these:

7) I need a bit more optimization in the way I have my PHP includes laid out. The way it is right now is almost perfect. It just needs a little refactoring to make the code more readable.

8) Time permitting, I’d like to update my homebrew comic archive system to use a database to store comic information instead of plain text files. This would allow me to find next/previous comics much faster. You probably won’t notice it, but if the comic starts bringing in a large enough amount of traffic, it’ll be a boon to my processor quota.

9) Ideally, and also time permitting, I want to get said homebrew comic archive system to the point where I can distribute it to other comic artists. I’ve looked at the various other archiving systems available on the net, and the only one that even comes close to mainstream usability is Comicpress, but that usability comes at the expense of customizability. I could certainly do the upcoming design in it, but it would take me weeks to sift through Comicpress’s massive CSS file to figure out how. I’d like to create something with Comicpress’s ease of use, but with my system’s versatility.

10) I don’t really expect time to permit, though. Maybe I can crank some of that stuff out while I’m off from Job during the week of Exmass through New Years. Bare minimum, though, I want to at least code it up so that the correct chapter link is listed for each comic. That’s a trivial matter; I’ve already got my plan of attack in mind. It’ll be four new LOCs (Lines of Code), tops.

Non-coder/scripter/programmers in the audience probably don’t care about any of that stuff, but these are the sorts of things that haunt my dreams. That and the ghost of my conjoined twin.

Did you notice my use of the word “Job” (capitalized) in bullet 10? I’ve gotten into the habit of defining “Work” and “Job” like so:

Your Job is what you do to raise money to finance your real Work.

I like to use Job the same way Work is used, by which I mean, as both a noun and a verb. In my case, I have a Job as a software engineer. The pay where I Job is fantastic, and the position is so cushy I could almost call it hedonistic. It’s mind-numblingly boring, though, and I would love to quit it some day. Fortunately, I have my Work, i.e. Taco Man and Burrito Boy, to look forward to when I get home.

My long-term goal with my Work is to be able to make enough money to start dropping a couple hours a week at my Job. I was thinking I might talk about money-making ideas next week, but I’m not ready to discuss that just yet. We’ll see what else I come up with.

CURRENT MOOD: Labels

Work on the book continues, and were it not for Hastily Fashioned Filler Month, said work would not do that. Whew!

Fun fact: I have no idea why I decided to play Tyrol myself in the fillers. If you think that’s a weird decision, wait until you see who plays Tigh! Anyway, I couldn’t have done this week’s and the next two week’s filler strips without my most excellent girlfriend’s help, so a big thanks to Melissa for (wo)manning the camera!

Also, my beard was only about two weeks old when these strips were shot. It usually looks a lot fuller than that. Just look at my Twitter picture!

All of the content in the book is written, drawn, laid out, and ready for print. All that is left now is the cover. Ideally, that will be done this week.

After that, I will generate a PDF, give that PDF one last proofread, and then send it off to ComiXpress. They’ll send me a proof, I’ll read through it and give my final thumbs up, and then my initial order of books will make its way here. Excitement!

Now that I’m just about done with this crazy project, I’m ready to start thinking about what went wrong so it doesn’t go wrong again.

1) I lost a LOT of strips in a disk crash a few years ago. I still had the Photoshop files (which contain the finished artwork) for most of them, so all I had to do for those was redo the lettering. That actually gave me an opportunity to rewrite some dialog in many strips. For a couple strips, though, I didn’t even have the Photoshop files. Fortunately, the files on the website are of a decent resolution, so for the two or three strips that forced my hand, I was able to use those without it looking like complete terror.

Regardless, having to re-letter fifty-odd strips added two or three weeks to the project. What have I learned? Back up your work!

2) Laying the strips out took forever. I spent two entire weekends pressing Command-D in InDesign to place the comic files into the pages. What have I learned? Lay out the comics in the book as you finish them! Don’t do it all in one shot!

3) PDFs are taking forever to generate. We’re talking almost two hours here, probably more. Part of this is because I’ve been placing my final Illustrator files into the book, which forces InDesign to rasterize those files every time I ask it to export to a PDF. What have I learned? Generate TIFFs from your Illustrator files ahead of time! Use those in the book!

4) Formatting has been a pain. Years ago, I hadn’t really expected to ever be making a book. Because of that, it never occurred to me to pick a comic size that would be easy to fit into print. Mind you, the strips look great in the book, but I did have trouble settling on a book format. What have I learned? Choose a web format that will also work as a print format! The new comics coming in December are sized the way they are for both pacing reasons and so that I can easily stick two on top of each other to make a single 8″x10″ page. Hoo yeah!

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head right now. If more occur to me, I’ll make sure to talk about them in my next post.

Next week, I’ll talk about the things that are going through my mind as I decide on the site design for the new tmabb.com!

CURRENT MOOD: Half Eaten

And welcome to Hastily Fashioned Filler Month here at Tee-mab!

Fun fact: I broke one of my Stik-fas while getting set up for today’s filler comic. Baltar was going to be played by a blue Stik-fa. Oh well. That little purple guy is funnier, anyway.

I thought I’d try and give you guys a little behind-the-scenes treatment during the break. This week, I’m going to jabber a bit about the book.

First of all, I have some bad news: due to cost concerns, I’m switching from Lulu to Comixpress for the book. Because of this, I won’t be able to get the book out on December 3rd like I had originally planned. You’ll know the new date as soon as I do.

BUT, the good news is, the book will cost five bucks less as a result! So, I think this is worth the extra wait.

I’m hoping to have the book done by the time I go to bed tomorrow night. I have all of the strips laid out, and I’ve done all of the non-strip spacer art (the little drawings you’ll see in what would normally end up being empty space due to wonky formatting in the earlier comics). So, everything from pages 8 through 97 — apart from some title page art — is finished, proofread, and ready for print.

Here’s what’s still left to do before I’m ready to send a PDF off to Comixpress (hint: read this to find out some of the nifty stuff you’re going to get in the book!):

- Character Bios
- Artwork to accompany the Celebrity Foreword (I’ll reveal who wrote it soon)
- Timeline and accompanying artwork, laying out in a decidedly de facto manner exactly what we know has happened when in the Tee-mab saga
- Title page artwork for Books 1 and 2 (there are two books in this book!)
- Front cover
- Spine
- Back cover

It’s gonna be a long couple of days!

I’ve pretty much decided on pricing, but I’m going to hold off on announcing that just yet. I want to wait until I actually have the books in my hands. Suffice it to say, you’ll be able to get a regular, boring ol’ normal book for such-and-such, or you can have the Artist Edition, which will include a signed sketch and a hand addressed envelope (!), for such-and-such more!

CURRENT MOOD: Candy Coated Surplus