I’m trying to decide which software to use for a forum. I’m considering 4 at the moment: BBPress, phpBB, Simple:Press, and Vanilla. I’ve installed them all on the site and opened registration. Click the links in this post to find them. Feel free to sign up and try them out, let me know which one you prefer and why.
What’s the status of things right now? Well, if you’ve been watching this page lately you’ve noticed I’m tinkering with the theme. An issue that’s bugged me for awhile is needing multiple installs of Wordpress to power my comic sites as well as this blog and the Lil’ Reaper Books page. It’s inefficient from a resources standpoint and annoying from a practical perspective. If I’m logging into different accounts for different things nothing gets done. It needs to be simpler.
Now I’ve used ComicPress with the ComicPress Manager Plugin for some time, which is pretty awesome, but it doesn’t really support multiple comics yet. Enter Webcomic and Inkblot. They take the angle of using the plugin to power the comic so you can drop tags to display everything into any WP template. I like this approach. I’m still resolving issues with pointing the comics’ domains at the proper indexes, something I’m trying to work out between this WP Subdomain Plugin and the theme itself. If I can’t get it working I’ll just redirect to the page standing in for the index.
When I first started posting comics in 2002 it was on Keenspace, (Yes, back when it was still officially Keenspace) and things ran smoothly for about 3 days until I deleted some all-important file. This was way back before the server melt down and nobody could be bothered to fix my problem or show me how to fix it at the time. Striking out on my own I moved to a dinky free website and updated using AOLpress and Blogger. Eventually I registered Towniescomics.com and decided at some point to move the archives to a php script solution to make it easier to change things on every strip’s page. That’s when I started using the Walrus script. Some time later I learned my way around MySQL, too, and moved to ATP Autosite. That got a little long in the tooth when web standards started getting brandied about. If you’ve tried looking for webcomic update scripts you know they have a habit of going undeveloped as time rolls on. Tyler Martin did us all a favor by rolling out the previously mentioned CP. That brings us right around to today.
WC & IB sort of remind me of the earlier days, back before WP got involved. The code’s relatively simple and easy to customize. I might go back and forth between it and CP as time moves on. They’re both good systems being developed concurrently. A little competition is good for developers. It keeps them on their toes. And at the moment it’s not too complicated to switch between the two, either. Right now I’m just focused on which will get my archives looking like I want with the least amount of fuss. After that I should probably decide on a shopping cart system to replace the LRB site. Then I need to customize the theme on the new Community. This is important because I want it to just feel like another part of the site instead of just a forum slapped on. I was trying to integrate it with comment posting member registration but that’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth. I’d really rather just have you sign up and log in for one thing so I’m gonna see what I can do about tying it into the comment system another way. I just really need to get all this technology out of the way and get back to creating comics and posting about them, all the other stuff will happen in time.
I updated all my sites to Wordpress 2.8 once the built in updater recognized it was available. Things went smoothly on all of them except for this one. (Which I expected since I was running a lot of plugins in my attempts to fold all the other sites under this install.) I removed everything from the plugins directory besides what comes standard and that got rid of the error message. It also got rid of everything else. So I just decided to do an entirely fresh install since I’d been meaning to for some time, anyway. I’m pretty much back to where I was before the update, excluding the new features of the latest version, except one of my plugins needs to be fixed before I can use it.
I’m hoping I can get a replacement for whichever one is causing the problem or it gets upgraded soon. I’m not going to consider any one plugin critical to the changes I’m making because then I’d be in pretty big trouble every time there’s a new version out. However I’d rather rely on activating a few instead of having to dig into code and add functionality that way, both because that’s more complicated to do and it’s a lot easier to break with every upgrade.
On the top of my To Do list right now is decide on a unified theme, at least something of a unified header design so the pages and different sections look the same. I tried incorporating the blog theme on all the sites but really dropped the ball when it came to styling the ComicPress theme to look like the others. It didn’t help that I was unfamiliar with the new CP coding and that the headers are very different by design. I really need to go in and tweak the default to something I’m comfortable with, something I can then use on all the other sections of the site as I activate them.
Episode Transcript:
Hi, I’m Ben. I draw cartoons. You could say I’m a bit of a ‘Toonhead. I’ve been reading/watching/loving cartoons as far back as I can remember.
I’ve been drawing webcomics since 2002. I decided to start a podcast as something of a production diary. I’d like to get people involved as I write and illustrate books and other projects. I want to get feedback from people who like what I do and I’d like to get some dialog going with other creators. And plenty of non-creators like to peek behind the scenes and see how things run so I thought, why not? Some of these will just be me giving away some tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years, or earnestly asking questions of myself and to anybody listening. My brother Frank’s going to be on a few of them with me, as well as my buddy Kyle. Hopefully once things get going I can talk some of my other friends onto a few episodes, maybe get some interviews from other creators.
Right now I’m focusing on smaller collections of books. One-offs and possibly some ongoing series. (… serieses? serii?) After spending like 7 years with the same characters I think it’s time I just spent a couple weeks or so on individual ideas and see where it takes me. Setting that end goal of a finished book is very important. There’s the over-all goal of having a bunch of books to sell at cons but having the week-by-week breakdown is going to be important of feeling like I’ve accomplished something. In so many weeks I can say I finished a book. Then in so many months a series. I also consider myself something of an animator so I’m going to try my hand at things like flip-books and animated shorts. Those are probably going to be more long-term, though. Animating by yourself takes a lot of planning and laying stuff out. That’s why I got into comics – I could come up with an idea for a strip and post it online by the end of the day. It’s going to be interesting doing these self-contained stories.
When I made webcomics, it was usually about the strip for the day. Even if there was some over-arcing story the mind has to be focused on getting that day’s update done and posted. Making a book of that was usually selecting a chunk of story that could function by itself. And even then there’s going to be some overlap where the first couple of pages have to have some backstory on where the characters came from or how they got to that particular adventure, or something gets alluded to that only people visiting the site can understand. Even if your site only updates a couple times a week, putting comics on the web is a real grind and you have to have something there for people to see that day. When you get in that “strip-a -day” or whatever mindset it gets hard to work ahead and build a buffer and I find it creeps into the writing. Of course, when your strip doesn’t have a template and changes day by day it’s not particularly as solid, can be harder to follow, and you run the risk of having trouble printing it later. I think it’s probably best to have a page template – a certain aspect ratio you always use that will fit into books – but the actual panels can change depending on the story. Doing 3-4 panel comics can get you stuck in that particular rhythm. Thanks for listening to Episode Zero. Stay tuned for future episodes where I’ll talk about webcomics, stuff I’ve done, how to get started in webcomics, and other fun tips.
No-Rights Podcast: Episode Zero - Getting to Know Each Other [4:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
