Some recent developments over at dcr.org will be leading to eventual developments here at atc.com. Initially I plan to overhaul the commenting system to bring it in line with how dcr.org works and displays. The upside of that is it'll get rid of the CAPTCHA. The downside is I can't yet predict what that'll do to existing comments - they may Disappear from display and stay in the CMS, they may list properly, they may turn into radioactive hamsters. Who can tell.

I've also been contemplating the value of asset (read: comic page) thumbnails in the context of comic navigation - while displaying them "forward" is certainly spoiler-ish, "previous" is a bit less of a zinger. The implementation could range from something as simple as thumbnails of the previous page or two appearing on the front page only, to something as complex as thumbnail galleries for each comic and comic chapter, to (possibly, eventually) adding in a visual previous/next to the comic archive.

All of this was always possible with the current CMS - I never thought along these lines until I started playing with the dcr.org data model. ATC will eventually benefit in some capacity - hopefully without a fullblown site redesign.

Regardless of what happens with templates and comments and thumbnails (oh my), I'm totally doing Page 500 (dcr 4.10) first. And that's still a few days to a couple of weeks away at this point.