1. This is a brand spanking new site, for the first time in... ever, really. Since launch, ATC has been hobbling along on an increasingly hacked-together pile of PHP includes expelled from a Movable Type v2.63 backend. The new site has a Movable Type 4.21 backend and is straight HTML and CSS. I'm sure a few of you web developer types have already noticed it's very 1990s HTML, what with the tables and whatnot. Very advanced, tables. Cutting edge.
2. The gui has been tested in IE 6, IE 7, Safari 3.something-that-isn't-3.2 and whatever the current Firefox build is. There's a display glitch in Firefox (the progress bar table) that I'll eventually get around to debugging.
3. Since everything is now MT-sourced HTML, bda's old perlscript isn't backending the progress bar anymore.
4. The first major structural change, reflected by the new interface - it's now a hell of a lot easier to get to a specific comic and chapter. Much easier than it was previously. This was (initially) the major reason for the aesthetics upgrade... the fact the new site does a whole bunch of things the old one didn't is icing on the cake.
5. Reflecting the change in the gui layout, each book in the series now inhabits its own subdomain. Adding RSS for each would be trivial, but for the time being anything worth keeping track of will be shooting through the site root, so I figure one RSS feed is enough.
6. The RSS feed location hasn't changed. Aside from the background color and most of the CSS, it's the only thing that hasn't.
7. Comments are enabled and more or less debugged for the blog. If there's interest, comment functions can be added to the comic pages with minimal effort. If there's too much spam, comment moderation will be turned on, which will probably open another round of debugging. For the time being I've tried to make comments behave as they did on the old site - it's easier for me and it's less hassle for you. MT4 has the option for captcha. I don't know about you, but I fail those fucking things about 97% of the time, so they'll only be showing up here as a very last resort.
8. Transitional Voices still needs an icon. Hence the placeholduhr in the navbar.*
9. The wiki is where all of the cast, lexicon, candy, etc. stuff from the previous editions of the site will live, whenever the wiki is installed. The plan for that is Q1 2009 - by which point the site should be seriously rockin'.
10. If you're hard up for anything that was on the old site, well... you're in luck. The old site is here.
11. Things still aren't completely finished yet, but all the major functionality is in place - hence the launch. This is the new face of ATC - a face you can read without scrolling in full-screen mode on a Windows box (assuming a vrez of 1050 or greater).
HELL YEAH.
* Icons are non-trivial things. Especially when we're talking about Major Project Icons, like the Heirotus ding, the ATC ligature, etc. The TV icon has been in the doodle phase for a couple of months. One of these days I'll get it right. And then you'll SEE.
Oh yes. You'll see.