It is January, so that can only mean one thing. Time for the annual breaking-of-my-vow-to-not-stop-updating-the-web-comic-for-a-whole-year. But for good reason: it’s website redesign week!
This time the site looks similar-ish – the colours and most of the artwork are exactly the same, the layout is different but nothing crazy – however, under the hood it’s been completely redesigned from the ground up. I’ve made the big switch, from basic HTML (which I was completely coding by hand myself) to PHP, specifically WordPress with the Comicpress addon. What this basically means is that every time I upload a comic, the page is made for it automatically, it’s added to the archive automatically, the RSS is done automatically… basically it eliminates the extra hour I used to have to spend after drawing every cartoon trying to make it fit into the site. Not that this was a lazy decision. I had to re-upload all the comics dating back to 2004, all 300 of them, plus I had to transcribe them all and write little blog entries for each one. Altogether I’ve written about 15,000 words in the last seven days, and that’s not counting this.
Anyway, the site should be a lot more usable now – the ‘Random’ feature actually works now, as do the archives (which are also nicely formatted and everything) and there’s even a search feature. The main one is at the top, but on the bar below the comics there is a ‘Search Transcript’ feature which lets you search through all the text in a chosen comic too. SWISH.
ANYWAY, if you happen to find any problems or weirdness, please let me know at mark@deedtheinky.com
OH. Also you can comment on stuff now too. We’ll see how much of a good idea that turns out to be.
A proovciatve insight! Just what we need!