... it's now a question of "how much bling in the gui."

By which I mean, how graphically intense do I want to make the site?

It's one thing to be serving up around 400+ 600x900 jpegs; another to blam an additional ream of smaller files - most of which would stay cached with every page load. Obviously, the more graphically intense the site the longer it'll take to produce and the longer it'll take to debug. That isn't the big issue here - the big issue is just how much space do I want to give over to Stuff What Isn't Actually Content (meaning words, navigation, comic pages, etc).

Space is something web developers don't seem to give a ghost of a shit about these days. Me, I hate scrolling through a pile of whatever to get to a strip or article or comic page or whatever - and I've tried to implement accordingly. Not that there aren't certain insurmountables, but back when ATC was just The Dualist, navigation worked pretty damned reasonably and, in my opinion, was a hell of a lot cleaner and easier to use than most other webcomics.

Then DCR and TV got loaded in and blew that all to hell.

Sometimes that's the hardest part of the post - the title. And on long endurance development burns, not even necessary.

Points:

1. DCR.1 has been loaded in. We knew this.

2. TV.1 has also been loaded in. A bit more tedium than the DCR loadin, but it's done.

3. I've done some preliminary beating-on of MultiBlog. Posts from any of the comic blogs will now show up on the front page as intended. No screwing around with php includes or a comic-specific index writeout. The "blog" blog is now the ATC front, period.

4. For the moment, I have enough content to get started on the stuff that goes into the Utility blog - namely the book/chapter summaries for each of the comics. After that, it'll be time to get serious about brewing a gui and solving whatever other problems happen to pop up.

5. At present, the plan is a simple one. Add some nuts and bolts to the Utility blog, then brew up the gui and implement it. Then get rolling on The Dualist (second edition). Then the wiki. I don't expect progress on any of these fronts to be speedy, so this could be it for major web development for the foreseeable future.

But we knew that.

DCR.1 has been loaded in, and the MultiBlog thinger looks to be behaving as expected, so far.

There's the expected glitches, but it's pretty much the MT default behaving to spec.

Beer O'Clock, gentlemen. More Love And Hate on the morrow.

... after creating blogs, of course - which one to use for seed content.

DCR seems like the best candidate, since Whitehouse is complete and not going anywhere. The main point of this whole thing is the second edition of The Dualist, so I'll need to finalize the new intro pages before I start with that. TV : Earth could work just as well as DCR, but TV : Earth needs some more editorial cleanup before I canonize it.

So DCR gets to be my Work Bitch.

Hopefully the auto-rebuild function works - the intent is to create the blogs, seed DCR, and see how well that works in terms of display and updates... if it works how I'm thinking it oughtta, then I won't need to lug around a top-level index writeout or dick with index templates for the individual comic blogs - the root news template should just grab whatever's available from what should be blogs 3, 4, and 5.

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The blogs are created and more-or-less configured. Loadin is on hold until Eric changes permissions on a couple of the subdomains. dualist.atc is fine, but dcr.atc and tv.atc are both currently owned by root, which makes MT sad.

Noise for the News category.

For real, things kind of start here. Another post to another commonly used category and then I'll be able to start "debugging" the writeout of entry filenames, which is the first major step towards getting the comic back on its feet.

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

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You just gotta love the canned text.