Deed The Inky » website redesign

The Great Annual Deed The Inky Redesign.

Markasaurus — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:49:38 +0000

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.

Happy New Year!/Resolutions/Couple Of Minor Changes To the Site/A Slight Perceived Douching

Markasaurus — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:00:10 +0000

First of all, Happy New Year everybody! I hope you all felt appropriately shitty this morning. I know I did. SO, my New Years resolution this year is to keep doing Deed The Inky three times a week, all year, no exceptions. To this end I am going to have to streamline things a little bit, so some cartoons will be simpler black and white affairs, like todays. I don’t think it really detracts too much and it takes like 1/4 of the time, so… yes, we will see.

In other news, during my daily perambulation around my favourite other webcomics I discovered this…

I loves me some Toothpaste For Dinner, but this is a bit rich seeing as their site doesn’t even have a links section. So yeah, not really all that surprising. How about spreading the love around a little bit there, Stretch?

Programming HTML Until It Is 3:30am And You Are Blind. Also Charles Dickens!

Markasaurus — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:28 +0000

I made a few minor changes to the site today… I added a permalink for each comic to make them easier for people to grab, and most noticably I added buttons for all the big social-network-site thingies. I had a bit of internal debate about whether I should do that, because Deed The Inky has a long standing tradition of not being commercial at all. That means no advertising, anywhere. But I figured there’s nothing wrong with giving a shout out to a site that you actually use, and no-one’s paying me to do it so I think I’m in the clear. Plus there’s a guy on Reddit called “Quasiperiodic” who awesomely adds Deed The Inky on there every now and again, so this should make life easier for him! Or her!

IN OTHER NEWS, you know that Tinyurl site, that replaces your URL with a much easier one? Someone has created a similar site, only a thousand times better because it replaces your URL with a line from Charles Dickens! I signed up for it right away, and I think I got a good one! So in the future, if you want to read Deed The Inky and you are in the mood to talk like a Victorian gentleman, you can type http://dickensurl.com/4303/Old_Marley_was_as_dead_as_a_doornail!

Brand New Looking Website!

Markasaurus — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:00:01 +0000

So it’s January first, the time of year when I traditionally get sick of how Deed The Inky looks and redesign the whole thing. This time I went pretty hard and added a whole assload of possibly useful things though! First up is the RSS feed which had actually been running for a couple of weeks already. If you want to get new Deed The Inky cartoons in your email or whatever RSS thinger you use, click on the little RSS icon in the address bar or use this link… http://www.deedtheinky.com/deedtheinky_rss.xml. NEXT is a button under the frame where you can look at some random cartoons from the archives. Turns out that is kind of a pain in the ass to implement on a website, but I did it anyway because I love.

Uhm… what else? The cartoons are going to be bigger and widescreen-ier now. Also the store will be going very soon. I am hunting out printers, getting samples etc etc. Turns out that selling T-Shirts on the internets actually takes a bit of sorting out. Then last and possibly least there is the mobile site at m.deedtheinky.com where you can look at cartoons on your iPhones and whatnot. That last one might actually turn out to totally suck but I guess we’ll see!