As far as web standards go, it is coming along nicely. If you remove all styling, the page is still very readable and easy to navigate. It isn’t nearly as pretty, but it should be really nice for those text-based browser people. I personally don’t know why anyone with a text-based browser would look at this site, but it is good practice for me.

The page is also becoming more search engine friendly. Code wise, the pertinent information is closer to the top of the page thus making it easier for search engines to spider. One bit of SEO I stumbled across while setting up the comics was that I could make the text of the comics searchable. It is a bit more work putting up a comic because of it, but via Textpattern I can put a transcript of the comic in the page that is hidden. That way the text can be spidered and queried.

Another thing I have done so that I can handle all the extra content I plan to add is make a dropdown menu. Thanks to a tutorial on A List Apart, I was able to make a nice, degradable menu system. It only uses a little Javascript and that is because of IE(Internet Explorer) shortfalls in CSS.

Attractiveness is coming along too. So far I really only have colors picked out, but the actual graphics should be coming along soon. The plan is not to use too many images, but just enough to give it a little pizazz. I really only want to use them to ad some curves, highlights and shadows to give the page more depth. It would be really nice if I could use SVG, but that will have to wait until IE gets proper support. For now I will stick with PNG.

Now the comic publishing is going to take a bit more work. TXP is a great CMS, but I like to handle my comic images a bit differently than how it handles image files. Namely maintaining the file name. For comics, I use the naming convention of YYYYMMDD.png. This shortfall aside, it seems to handle basic navigation pretty well. Chapters and beginning comic navigation seem to be a bit of trouble. Hopefully I will be able to find a solution to that. If all fails, I am sure the Textpattern Community will be able to help out. So far I have found a nice and dynamic way of posting the comic files using vanilla TXP functionality.

Right now I am going to focus on the text content and design, then I will get the comics fully operational. When that happens I will put up my findings so that someone else may be helped by them.

Last fall, I decided to try it when I volunteered to “help” redesign the local anime convention’s homepage. Needless to say, they were ecstatic. At the time it consisted of a bunch of static HTML files that were edited in BBEdit and then uploaded. This means every time there was an update the whole page which included several separate files had to be updated and then uploaded.

I didn’t hear a lot from the time of the convention throughout the end of the year. The webmaster was busy doing a novel for National Novel Writing Month and there wasn’t a lot of planning going on at the time. I took the opportunity to play around with different layouts and color schemes and just kind of wait to hear something.

I finally made contact in January. Apparently the current webmaster had stepped down (he was only doing it because they really needed someone) and they wanted to know if I was interested. It sounded interesting, so I said yes. I tossed a few ideas I had at them, and they liked what I had to say. Not to say they understood what the hell I was talking about for half of it, but at least I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. They gave me free reign over everything for the website.

The first thing I did was install Textpattern to make updating easier. As i have mentioned in previous postings, I am a fan of that particular CMS. It is easy to set up and very flexible. It would also be able to handle all the different sections and information I would need to post on the site.

I then applied my templates to the system and tweaked things. This part took way too long just for the fact I have been horribly busy at my real job. Not to mention IE(Internet Explorer) is, as always, a pain in the ass. After much swearing, I managed to get it done and tonight, it went live.

It still needs some content, but after todays meeting, I am hoping to be getting all the information shortly. I will probably do a few minor and insignificant tweaks, but for the most part, it is done.

We noticed when we got to the artist’s studio (Jerry Simpson’s studio to be specific) that there were everal Meetups happening that night there. Nothing wierd about that really, for I operate multiple Meetups myself and schedule them for the same time and place. One of them was called Artists Trading Cards, and it piqued our curiosity. After asking Jerry about it, we decided to stay for it.

Now for a quick and dirty explanation of ATCs. In short, they are a small piece of original artwork meant to be traded to another artist for one of their own. They are the size of a normal trading card (2.5 inches by 3.5 inches) and the artwork can be in any medium imaginable. They can be a sketch, painting, collage, sculpture or even a computer generated image printed out. The only limit is your imagination. (There is an offshoot of ATCs that can be sold called Art Card Editions & Originals and can be found on Ebay and Overstock.com. Just search for the term “ACEO”.

I had never heard of such a thing before, but apparently it has quite a following. There were about 10 people at this first gathering I attended, and that is considered a small one according to Jerry. As I would soon find out, there are a lot of people that show up to these tradings and one can walk away with upwards of 70 new miniature pieces of art. This last one I attended had approximately 30 people sifting through binders looking for a good trade.

Anyway, enough explanation; back to the story: My girlfriend took right to making cards and made up about 10 for the next month’s trading. They were a bit rough, but it was her first time and she was still trying to find her groove. Nonetheless, she got some nice cards in trade and even more inspiration for next time. I never got around to making any myself, but I gathered more ideas for when I decided too. I figured it would be a good way for me to get out of my artistic slump I had been in. It was just a matter of sitting down and doing it.

It took me a couple of months before I felt the drive to actually get something together, but I finally did. It was a simple card: person with a Texas hold ‘em hand. (I had been playing a little bit of poker recently.) I did it along the lines of how I do most of my artwork. Sketch it out in nonphoto blue and then ink over it, allowing for easy scanning of the lines. This time however, I converted the lines to vectors using and open source program called Inkscape and colored it there.

Normally, I would just use the GIMP, but I felt like doing something different this time. The reasoning for this is for scalability. If you use a raster image editor like GIMP, you are kind of stuck at the maximum pixel size at which you create it. (Enlarging it, you would get a lot of pixelization.) With vector graphics, no matter how large you make it, there will always be a nice smooth line whether it is a 2.5 inch by 3.5 inch card, or a roadside billboard. Also, since the card was a cartoon image and there would be mostly flat colors, it would take to the format quite well.

The next step was to prepare a sheet of the cards to cut apart. Luckily, Inkscape has a really nice tiling system. Why is this nice? Simply because it makes making sheets of identical images very easy. I just set it to 3 columns and 3 rows of images, and all the cards were perfectly aligned on the sheet. I decided to make the final number of cards 15. This is because the first sheet had the right side of the cards cut off since I neglected to compensate for my printer’s limitations. (It can’t print the full width of a 9 by 12 inch piece of bristol paper.)

To cut them up into single cards, I used a rotary cutter. These are quite nice for the fact it gives you a nice straight cut unlike scissors and is quicker than a exacto knife and metal ruler. I just had to align preprinted cutting lines to the edge of the blade and slide it across the sheet. This part of the process only took me about 15 minutes to cut apart the 15 cards. Not too shabby. After I got them all cut up, all that they needed was my name, city, print number and signature.

After the trade off was done that night, I was relieved of 9 cards of my own. In return I got some very nice cards from others. Now it is time to make some more and get more variety so that I can get more.

First I get sick on the weekend i wnat to do it, and then I get busy with work and extracurriculars so that my free time is sucked to nil the week following. It is a pain in the ass, I tell you. Technically, it is not big worry. It is not as though I am losing money over it. This page is mostly a platform for my CSS tinkering.

In other news though, I finally bought my first decent digital camera. It is a FujiFilm FinePix S5100 and I am rather pleased with it so far. Yeah, it is only 4.0MP, but technically, I have never really needed any photos that big. It has a few mild SLR camera features and feels similar to one too. It is comfortale to hold.

I have been snapping all sorts of things with it. In fact, I took the picture you see up in the header with the camera. I have placed the original here, but at a rather low resolution. Just to give you a taste. I plan on taking some better pictures and posting them at some point, too. So you have that to look forward to.

Some other plans are to get my old comic up here and archived again. I will most likely be putting them into the Textpattern system for now until I get myself another system built. That wil be a long time coming though.

Some of the things that need work are simple, and others will take a bit more time. The simple things are the CSS for the basic tags like links, list tags, blockquotes, etc. There is also basic code cleanup which isn’t that hard to do. The graphics will take a bit more time though. The header is only tempoirary, and I need a lot more background graphics to make it look less flat.

Other than that, though, it is pretty much done. I figure as long as I have a solid day to work on it, I can have it done. I am thinking by the end of the week as long as work goes well. We will see about that though. Problems have been plaquing us lately. Just minor things, but they take time.