Thing the first: working on a WordPress update.
Thing the second: probably going to do away with the forum and move comments to WordPress.
Thing the third: in a few comics or so we have some actual photos. New style, interested in your thoughts.
More things later if I think of them.
I wrote my first plugin, or rather significantly modified someone else’s plugin, to offer better comic navigation for the comics. If you’re on the homepage, you still have to click the “navigation links” link under the current comic to get to the nav links, but once you do that, you can now navigate through the archive by category — so if you just want to read the Get Outta My Head comics, you can do that, or just the Sketchy Theater, or just the Idiocy on the Internet. And the Comics category stays there so you can navigate through all the comics as well. This makes me happy :)
Next three orders of business: fix the left nav up because one of my images keeps stepping on it (might be “fix the image” instead) and then add some big ole buttons to access the forum and the store to the top somewhere.
But not right now. This programmer’s going to go get some sleep.
I tweaked the comic/post navigation tonight with the help of an awesome plugin that makes it really easy for me to list the same post in multiple categories and still allow you, gentle reader, to navigate through just a single category of items. To access the nav links, as always, just click the post’s title.
A quick thanks to Jeremy and Rob who helped me hunt down the plugin, because my corner of the Internet insists that Scriptygoddess.com doesn’t exist. I’m guessing some DNS just hasn’t propagated yet.
UPDATE: 12:02 am
Orrrr…. or I could take the edits back out, at least temporarily, because I discovered that when the plugin was in place you could navigate FORWARD into the comics that are queued up, and well, there’s not much point in having a buffer if you can read the comics in it before their time.
dangit. back to the drawing board.
Yeah, so last night at about 11:30, I was working on some code for a little side-project while watching the Phillies game and generally trying to spin down from a crazy day. I got about 2/3 of what I needed done, and I tried to push a new stylesheet up to the system, when suddenly everything choked. Dreamweaver, which is prone to the occasional odd error message, informed me that it couldn’t upload the file in question because, well, the file didn’t exist, or maybe I didn’t have permission to use it.
And, well, that’s bunk, because I’m the ONLY one with permission to use these files, and this particular one had been uploaded mere minutes before. So I logged on to my web host and decided to manually upload the file instead…. only to discover that Dreamweaver wasn’t lying; the directory I was working in was empty. So were most of the others. Most of the pages here woudn’t load, and a good chunk of my other work was just plain gone.
Panic ensued.
I sent a note to the support team, waited a few minutes, and watched as one by one entire directories just poofed. No backup files, no forum, no wordpress… Another panicked note to the support team. This time, a response: they’re aware of it and working on it and it’ll be up within the hour. But that was at 1 AM and I have to be to work early today for a meeting. (yay meeting.)
Did you ever go to bed at night and wonder if everything you’d done was going to be there in the morning? Not a comfy feeling. I think I “get” Neverending Story in a whole new way now.
After a fitful night sleep, I’m back, and so is everything else. The support team was, as always, good to their word. And I am immediately applying what I learned. First, a backup was done. (I do these regularly, but not regularly enough.) And second, I’ve added a link to my Xanga blog in the links section. Strangely, when everything else was disappearing rapidly last night, the homepage was still there, so the links section was still functional. If all else has failed, I’m relatively sure Xanga will still be standing, and since it doesn’t live on the same server as everything else, it’s a decent place to post updates when I can’t post updates. Of course, in case of catastrophe, homepage mileage may vary, so you may want to make note of that one somewhere if you haven’t already.
So anyway, mental breakdown over, and I have to get my butt to work. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours contains fewer heart-attack inducing elements for all of us.
So here we are.
I’ve got all but 20 of the comics moved over into the new system, and I’m not going to move the blog posts from the last year over at all. (Well, except the ones I already moved.)
Navigation’s fairly straightforward – use the categories to the left to narrow down your viewing pleasure. (Want to see just the comics? Click “comics”. Just GOMH? Click “get outta my head”. Just the blog posts? click “ideas”. You get it.)
There’s a help link in the “pages” area that I’ll be glad to fill out as time goes on.
Archives read newest to oldest, just like the old one, which might take a little getting used to for the comics, but I’m sure it’ll work out.
If you prefer an RSS feed, make sure to check it out – it’s in that left nav thing. And one of my projects is to transcribe all the comics somehow so that the “search” will bring up searches against them as well.
Comments? Well, comments are my last big project to overtake – somehow this winter I hope to wire something into WordPress that will automatically create a forum thread when I post a new post, but that’s nowhere near even the beginning of development, forget the end.
My “to do” list: