It's Deja Vu All Over Again

2013.03.19 @ 14:08 · · 2 comments

One of the many changes with v10 - site build logs are moving from irregularly and inadequately maintained blog posts to a changelog of doom. The "version 10.x" in the footer is now somewhat automated, and should increment to 10.1 in a week or two when I come back to make a few more tweaks in preparation for ATC's tenth anniversary in May.

Build notes and related babbling will be accessible from the site footer for the foreseeable future. That changes the focus of the Website blog category from All Things Website to Look At This Fucking Website - and if you haven't visited in awhile.... things have changed! A lot! It's Deja Vu All Over Again!

Somewhat literally, as Earth -42- is sitting on top again. It hit the top in 2008, then again in 2009 between the second edition of The Dualist and the resumption of Dead City Radio, and now it's back in its rightful place as the current-in-reading-order page of the comic. TV.2 - which has been in production hell for months - opens minutes after this scene.

Five years forward, five years forward back... it's either a tenth anniversary or a double-fifth anniversary or I don't know what. The comic's about to start moving forward-forward after five years of moving forward from an earlier point in time. I'd like to reveal the seventh Chosen before I'm forty, kthx.

Anyway. More changes en route, and production hopefully resumes within the next couple of months. Stay tuned!

The Ides of March.

2013.03.13 @ 03:37 · · comment

I came at this a few different ways and each descended into a cesspit of emo. The site needs an upgrade, it's been mostly worked out on paper, it's also been mostly mostly worked out in a straight HTML/CSS/javascript template, and I'll be pulling the trigger this month. Hopefully later this week. The template has been through a couple of rounds of peer review, I've made a few adjustments, and I need to think through a few minor structural details before I start construction.

Being the largest structural change since 2008 and possibly the single most complex upgrade ever, the amount of work entailed fits right in with everything else going on in my life at the moment. Unlike everything else the site build has a definite end point, well-known and understood technical hurdles, and only one known land mine - that being twitter API changes announced for Some Time This Year.

This is the "it's happening" announcement - the next blog post will probably be the changelog. The current build has been live for six or seven months - the new one will hopefully have a longer lifespan. It will be a hell of a lot more malleable than the current template - but then, just about everything is!

Website Version 9

2012.08.30 @ 23:45 · · comment

ATC Website Version 9, aka "Furnace" (atc v.8) version 2.

Version 9.0

A full Refueling and Overhaul. In no particular order:

· CSS, site graphics, etc. : Rewritten. Based on the previous version of the site. Contrast bumped up a bit, reformatted to a flat 960 pixels wide - 610 center as previous, 172 menu gutters. Primary domain and book subdomains now have custom favicons. Site header graphics are still largely based on airshow photography - B-52 landing gear, P-3 Orion hull, F-15 hardpoints. Books use book-appropriate graphics. The site still uses the menu trick _Lasar worked out for the previous version of the site, and comic navigation and the main menu are adapted from _Lasar and Eric's efforts, as it was a hell of a lot easier to copypasta and tweak a couple of ul blocks than it would have been to write them from scratch. Section aesthetics are controlled completely by body ID, comic chapter graphics are dictated by body class. The only graphics (img tags) in the HTML templates are the main menu rollovers. Frequently used objects are now MT templates - V.9 makes much more extensive use of MT internals than V.8 and previous ever did.

The design (by which I mean the div structure and formatting) isn't totally clean but it is a huge improvement over previous builds.

· All website templates : Rewritten and/or retooled from the previous versions. The only bits that haven't changed from the previous site are the comment modules. Added noscript conditions to the modules so the anonymous field is disabled if JS is turned off but otherwise, comment code is now the oldest part of the live site.

Read the rest of Website Version 9

Website Version 9 Build Log

2012.08.30 @ 23:39 · · comment

2012.08.25, mid afternoon : It's time to start carving up the new base template and applying it to the site. Work will begin with the blog and the book pages. This build is a bit more complex on the back end than previous versions of the site and as such I expect the base implementation to take a couple of days. At this point the plan is to begin construction in the early evening of August 25, with base templates and shakedown complete at some point on the 26th. The site should be functionally transitioned by September and will hopefully be Ready For Primetime by October.

Shakedown shouldn't take more than a day or two - that time estimate is based on the fact that the Universe section is going to need extensive re-tooling to get it updated for v9. There's also some additional content development a bit further down the to-do list.

V9 has a green light and construction begins an hour or two after I post this. The basics should be in place before midnight tonight. I'll append this entry after the initial round of upgrades is complete. I would like to receive feedback on glitches, errors, issues, etceteras and would like to get some idea of what this thing looks like in IE8/9 - at the moment everything is Fine in firefox, chrome, and mobile safari.

2012.08.26, 04:28 : Went out, did the Goth Night thing, had the kind of time that's probably still covered under NDA, came home and banged on entry templates and CSS a bit. Blog is pretty much go, Transitional Voices is pretty much go. Need to hammer out a few more things before I apply the TV templates to DCR and The Dualist; plan to do all that after some sleep!

2012.08.27, 02:12 : Finished the overhaul on Transitional Voices and applied the results to the completed books. Went on to revise the About page and the main page, and got sucked into some fairly extensive editing of chapter synopses and and About entries.

The new site is technically live, though not yet fully functional - I still need to build a couple of archive templates, I still need to overhaul the Universe (which is why it's presently disabled), and there are a few other things to do. The comic is navigable - that's the important thing!

My current goal is to get the archive templates implemented Monday night, the Links page implemented at some point this week, and to get a start on formatting and figuring out the changes to the Universe section this coming weekend. And I still have a few days to squeeze in a basic DCR cover.

I will continue to update this entry until the site is roughly where I envisioned it when I started construction.

In the meantime, comic navigation has received a major overhaul - go check it out! :D

20120828, 04:56 : Tag search is totally live. I, on the other hand, am not. Tag cloud looks goofy in IE7. Fairly happy with things otherwise - even if MT search templates are probably gonna drive me to wordpress. Does things tag search does not do out of the box, cuz that's how I roll.

Totally going to bed now. Build's got a couple of days left - getting basic functionality on tags was a big ticket item. Beating on it until it Does What I Mean and then some feels like a pretty significant win.

17:59 : Where in the heck did the afternoon go?! I know the Archive Page didn't eat all of it...

The Comic Post Archive (linked again for emphasis!) is up, which is one of the last bits of templating on the build list. I'm still recovering from yesterdays tag search templating marathon and am in dire need of a breather, so I may not get to the Universe today (hah, hah.). I know basically what I want to do with it, and the tight integration with tag search is going to prompt a very extensive content overhaul of that section.

Goals for this week have been revised - get a DCR cover mocked up (a real one can follow later!), and get the Universe templates hammered out. Beyond getting one or two entries updated, actual content development can wait for September.

20120829, 00:05 : Universe has interim templates, and will likely be revised a bit further after the content has been edited. Content is more or less ready to go - only a few more things to do, nothing template-heavy.

Whew!

17:20 : OCD-blast complete. All existing Universe entries have been tagged. Some of them have been edited, and all of them have been converted from inline thumbnails to asset-generated thumbnails. This isn't that big of a deal at the moment but it'll be pretty major when I finish the overhaul.

The next phase of Universe development will be to upgrade all entries to higher-res thumbnails, and to tag all cast members by "priority" (eg, Primary/Secondary/Tertiary/Cameo or some such). That's always been scheduled as a "later" thing - the priority over the past few days was to get the content tweaked so it fits into the current website. As it stands now I have one thing left to do to get the v9 launch completed, and that's the links page. I hope to get to that tonight or tomorrow. The rest - Universe "upgrades" and extensions, fleshing out the About and book indexes to leverage tagged characters, and the "new reader?" section - can and will wait until Later.

20120830, 18:57 : Another big day for the site. Fortunately, a lighter workload than previous days! Updated a few character portraits, added several new Universe entries, added chapter thumbnail navigation menus to chapter thumbnail pages (here's an example), tweaked the CSS for comic archive navigation a bit, and - this is the cool part! - hooked the Universe into comic pages. Check it out - if a Universe entry has a tag that corresponds to a page tag, that entry is written out into the page file. It's tripled archive build times, and I'm okay with that - I'm finally leveraging the tag database in a way that's really bringing the site together. It's been a ton of work, but I think it's really starting to pay off!

23:37 : Home stretch. Links templates and content done, links menu object enabled. Build log moved into its own blog post, V.9 entry will be repurposed for a proper release notes entry, which will follow shortly.

Website v. 2012.01

2012.04.20 @ 19:48 · · comment

As detailed in an earlier blog post: Commenting capability has been overhauled; comments have been upgraded for the blog and re-enabled for all three books.

As mentioned in the FAQ:

Supported authentication methods include OpenID, LiveJournal, Google, Yahoo! and Wordpress.com. At this point anonymous commenting capability is disabled, though it may be re-enabled at a future date.

Pretty much everything else that needs doing is gonna be work, and at this point all work is focused on DCR.5. And, yanno. Paying work.

Props to Eric for updating the MT install and pointing me in the right direction re: fixes and debug.

Oh, and!

Process Tags stopped working, and the "replacement" method, mteval, doesn't even pretend to work in the context that Process Tags used to.* Fortunately the metadata audit got rid of the one regular instance of an MT tag in post data, and the book indexes (ex: dcr) - the only place that in-post tags were used otherwise - have been hacked back into shape with minimal effort. I'll need to do some template fiddling to get DCR.5 to list in the index As Intended, but that's relatively minor - and work that'll be done in a week or three, when DCR.5 is ready for launch.

20120421, 15:01 : Corrected a minor display glitch in entries with comments turned off. It kinda helps to have the div for the comments container inside the mt:if.

20120422, 15:54 : Sucked it up and added tooltips to all graphical links. This includes the left-hand menu bar, the next/archive links on comic pages, comic navigation, and the images in the book indexes. This completes the to-do list laid out in the previous blog entry.

20120515, 19:39 : Updated chapter graphics for the DCR index. Prior to today, 1-3 used photos, now they use the actual covers like 4 and 5. The header graphic will be changed to the book cover once a book cover has been generated.

20120723, 04:12 : All comic pages have been tagged. There are some serious formatting issues with the search template and search URLs, however - so I slapped an <mt:Ignore> container around the tag tags. The major groundwork is in place - I'll fiddle with formatting and search when it comes time for the next revision of the website. :)

* Using it in a Utility blog entry to pull the last entry date and category page count from a category in the DCR blog. mteval could quite possibly work internal to the blog calling it but that's not a functionality that current ATC information design can really capitalize on. The work-around is a bit less elegant under the hood but will look visually identical to the previous processtags.pl functionality.

There's something on the wing. Some... THING!

2011.11.14 @ 18:03 · · comment

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.

Website v2010.2 (Quiet Edition)

2010.12.28 @ 17:20 · · comment

Building on 20010.1 :

1. The footer CSS has been Mostly Fixed. It works "right" in Firefox, Chrome and IE, and it's slightly goofy in Safari. I'll hopefully get this fixed soon - in the interim it's Good Enough. Getting things Exactly Right will involve changing template HTML and new CSS across the entire site, so for the time being.... good enough.

2. While cleaning that up, I think I've found the last of the /NaN-throwers. Time will tell!

3. The biggest change isn't the footer, it's the "removal" of page metadata from all three books. It's still there, mind you - I've forked The Words off into a separate template stream and may eventually either re-integrate them or make them easily accessible to the casual reader. I haven't (technically) deleted or changed the metadata, just made it harder to get to.

The thought occurred to me while injecting the strip and original page metadata for Whitehouse and the first four pages of The Operative - I realized - with a sudden, rare clarity - that the VAST majority of page metadata is formatting notes, alteration notes, and emo. Lots and lots of emo. Given the signal to noise ratio, I began to feel strongly that a majority of the metadata actually detracts from the story - there's a lot of emphasis on what the story was and the struggle to shape it into what it is, as opposed to fresh, relevant commentary on the story, the artwork, the dialogue. Lots of links to old websites, to boot. Cleaning up four hundred pages is one thing - auditing four hundred essays? No. The chapter synopses? Yeah, gotta get to those. Show some pride, etc.

I've retained the metadata for the top page of the site for consistency and relevance, I can bring it back at any time... or I can, eventually, cross-link the two archives and keep an eye on analytics. For the time being, the metadata's been swept under the rug. End of.

There's more site work - and comic work - to be done. Before that can happen, I have a lot of work to do on other web projects. Once the present urgency has subsided, I'll revisit the ATC structure and proceed from there, with fresh eyes and a clear mind.

20110820 : All metadata has been audited and put back online.

SPANG!

2010.12.25 @ 23:24 · · 2 comments

Removed the comment logic from the comics - it will be trivial to add it back in at a later date, which I may do when DCR.3 begins production. After some meditation on the subject, it makes sense (given traffic volume) to whack out a chunk of markup that's going largely unused.

So. It was there, it isn't now, and it can be again. You can still comment on blog entries - that's unlikely to change!

Comic pages seem to load a hair faster now, at least to my eye. There should be some additional speed improvements when/if the comic templates are forked into "browse" and "blurb" streams, or if the metadata is "mothballed" entirely.

Inching towards readability.

2010.12.23 @ 19:31 · · comment

Getting work done on the Universe has always been a big blind spot - a low priority, something I don't feel is viable without at least a "top ten" of readership WHAT THE HELL IS ________ to work from. At this point the vocal readership is split evenly into three camps - those who like the comic just fine, those who roll their eyes every time I mention it, and those who yell "IT'S CONFUSING!". I need to hear from the latter, in detail.

RSS seems to work, FSVO "work." It's not something I use, it seems to do the intended job ("Hey, there's an update!") in the various apps I have on hand, and any further under-the-hood time would probably best be spent on Tags - which aren't something I have much of a need for at the moment. Eventually, probably - right now, not so much.

Chapter and Book writeups I'm going to need to do soonish - the present shape is barely useful to me. I can't imagine how useless the writeups are to a new reader, or a reader with a hazy memory of what happened in what chapter. I like the production information, but a synopsis isn't production details. It's a solicitation, a back-of-the-box blurb, an enticement. That, I can get behind.

So with the exception of chapter writeups, I'm scrapping the previous Q4 TDL and creating a new one - one that consists of that, and one other thing - DCR metadata.

"What?," I hear you not ask!

Simple - Whitehouse -1- through The Operative -4- have strip blurbs. They're on the strip site. A site that I'm going to re-task the hell out of in 2011 - a re-tasking that will in all likelihood be an effective re-formatting. The metadata will be moved here for preservation, though the original strips probably won't. Given the nature of DCR chapter one version one and the original version of the first four pages of DCR chapter two, the blurbs are bound to be more confusing than clear. I'm fine with that.

I put a lot of work into preserving The Dualist's original color commentary - once I've given DCR the same courtesy, I can nuke the .org with a clear conscience. I may even pull in the original round of blurbs for the original 6x8.33 version, just for the hell of it.

THAT SAID....

The DCR.3 script weighs in at 36 pages, with nine of those laid out. The script has been transcribed, the "workbook" file has been hardcopied, and pre-pre-production is about as done as it gets. Layouts, some kind of assets list and "schedule," then pages - all of which is (still!) on track for Q1 2011.

Pages are, as always, ATC Priority One.

Q4 To-Do List

2010.11.20 @ 13:14 · · comment

Various website-related tasks I'd like to complete before pre-production of DCR.3 begins in earnest:

1. [x] Universe : The cast members introduced in The Operative need entries - Jesse, Emily, and Judas Lang.
2. [_] Tags : I need to take a shot at this and see how difficult it will be to implement and glue together. If the template wiring is successful, then TV and DCR will be tagged ASAP, with The Dualist following at some point.
3. [-] Universe : Minor to extensive cleanup and revision, specifically of "first appearance" links for Thad, Ornix, and Tantek. If tagging implementation is successful, the Cast subsection of the Universe will be revised to include tag links for all characters.
4. [x] Comments : The comment implementation will be revised to include DCR on a test basis. If this is successful (and if it remains spam-free), commenting will then be extended to The Dualist and TV.
5. [_] RSS : Reader reports indicate a certain amount of feed wonkiness. I need to take a look at this and see what if anything can be done to improve the feed.
6. [_] Chapter and Book Writeups : These have needed a massive "burn it down and start again" rewrite for quite awhile now. The intent is to replace the existing blurbs with a mix of technical details and an actual story synopsis.
7. [_] Universe : Man, the Uni needs some love. Some serious love. As with the original version of the website, it's slipped off of the priorities list in favor of page production, and will doubtless do so again - before I dig in on DCR.3 I'd like get at least a bit more work done in this area.
8. [x] Social Media : ATC presently has a twitter feed (which replaced bdha's perl script) and recently - thanks Stina! - a Facebook page. At some point I'd like to get the T plugged into the FB (assuming that's possible, signs point to CAN!), thus covering a variety of bases and cutting down broadcast updates to something I can do from my phone. While I'm sober. Hah.

Oh, and some CSS tweaks to make ordered (and unordered) lists look spiffier.

If you have any suggestions, any site issues that make your brain itch, etc - please feel free to comment!

20101120.14:03 : The Social Media thing has been whack-a-moled. I went with Selective Tweets, which is a decision I may backtrack on later, as it throws an #fb hashtag into the twitter stream (clutter on the ATC site) and presently updates to both my FB account and the ATC FB page. I'd prefer strictly the latter, obviously - at some point I may switch things around, so that ATC FB page updates blam out to the twitter feed. For the time being the existing setup updates in the desired direction, though it's a bit messy for my tastes.

20101121.16:40 : Cast entries are pretty much up to date. How Yang slipped through the cracks for this long is anybody's guess - he's up now, as are the DCR.2 noobs. Further revision to follow.

20101121.17:08 : Cleaned up production/chronological appearances for all cast members appearing (to date) in both Dead City Radio and The Dualist. Will need to do another round during/after DCR.3 and again during/after DCR.4. Makes item 3 on the TDL a [-] instead of a [x] for the time being, as that writeup implies another pass to implement tag links, which is something I haven't started on yet.

20101121.19:58 : With some under-the-hood help from Eric, Comment capability has been added to DCR, The Dualist, and Transitional Voices. This has been tested on DCR and TV, and is just as glitchy-but-works as it is with blog comments. This has a couple of additional to-do items attached to it - first, a day of waiting to see if the comment logic gnarffles analytics (followed by changes if necessary). Second, comments have to be individually enabled on a per-entry basis. Hence the [-] for item 4 - DCR and TV are entirely comment-enabled. TD2E will be "activated" over the course of the week. Hopefully the CAPTCHA will continue to keep the spam at its presently nonexistent levels.

20101122.22:52 : Comments are now enabled for all comic pages. Let me know if I missed one! Also, this is CMS entry six hundred and sixty-six! Woot!

Actually 666 is the entry for Yang. Mum's the word!

20101127.19:02 : TV picked up some comment spam. If this isn't intentional hand-crafted (or pasted) bullshit, then the CAPTCHA either isn't working 100% properly on the subdomains or it's been compromised by spambots. If the latter turns out to be the case (eg if spam persists and comic comments go unused by the readership) then the functionality will be removed from The Dualist and Transitional Voices and put into hibernation for DCR.

It took some time for spam to rear its ugly head the first time around - I figure I'll leave the system in place (with occasional mopping as needed) until the end of the year, at which point I'll decide what to do with it. Hopefully tags and the rest of the to-do list will be in place by then.

Tenses of "Monkey"

2010.10.17 @ 17:54 · · 4 comments

"Fixed" an analytics quirk that I've been living with since I rolled out the new version of the website. I used quotes there for a reason - Analytics being analytics, it'll take awhile to see if it's actually 'stuck' or not.

I'm thinking of implementing tags on the comics and possibly the blog and universe. While this could be fairly non-trivial*, I rather like the idea of, say... one click getting you a list of every page Jason or Thad or Grij or the Sabrosa or (as I'm thinking of tagging things now) any other character or vehicle appears in. Could be handy. Could just be.... buzzwordy. Could also be useful or spoilery - Using recent DCR as an example, tagging operative -4- 'Jesse' tells you who's on the elevator long before she's mentioned by name.

There are a couple of downsides - the first big one is it may turn out to be non-doable, or more hassle than Eric is willing to allow. If that's the case, so be it. If tags are implemented, then the real downside hits - the Mega Tedium of tagging 400+ comic pages. The potential benefits could be worth it, though!

So, here's the question - as a reader, do you see the benefits of implementing tagging? Is it something you actually use on other websites? Are tag clouds useful to readers or just a trendy annoyance? Would it be worth it to take this further than reading and muttering?

Second, semi-related question - anyone see any benefits to adding comment capability to comic pages? I think on it and imagine a long string of "Typo!" and "Fixed!", which doesn't add much to the experience.

The Comment Horror of dcr and the old version of the ATC website - both of which use{d} the same CMS - is the main reason I've never bothered with comments on comic pages. At the time it would have meant an endless torrent of comment spam, mandating hair-pulling janitorial work on a very regular basis. The CAPTCHA seems to have proven out - while I personally consider them a pain in the ass, the implementation has brought MT comment spam to a screaming, shuddering HALT. Haven't been robo-spammed since. Not that I'm aware of, anyway. This means - in theory - that implementing comments should just be a matter of editing the requisite templates and waiting to see if anyone uses them.

15:21 < _Lasar_> solios: Tags might be interesting, but at this stage I wouldn't know why I'd use them. Maybe if I understand what the hell is happening one day. I imagine it would be fairly awesome for you, though. As for comments: Easiest way to invilve readers. Though I don't imagine much in the way of actually interesting commentary.
15:21 < solios> indeed
15:22 < _Lasar_> But it's cheap.
15:22 < _Lasar_> So I say go with comments.
15:22 < _Lasar_> It allows for effortless feedback.
15:23 < _Lasar_> No registering a forum account or sending email or whatever.

There's also that - the importance of which can not be understated.

* See here and here as well. Those two links and the one before the upper asterisk are the extent of my research at present.

Readership : Now lower than ever!

2010.08.01 @ 04:08 · · 13 comments

I know regular updates matter quite a bit, but damn. Averaging thirty hits a day for ATC and eighteen or so for DCR, with almost all of DCR's traffic coming from google image search.

Anayltics numbers don't go back to The Beginning - back then I used Webalizer - but they do go back far enough to see a definite dip.

That's what happens when you don't advertise, don't interact with the community, and don't update. Or so I've been told. Updates are the only thing I really have to go on, and there haven't been many of those over the past couple of years - moreso over the past couple of months, if you want to count the Rewriting Rampage as updating. Which, if the numbers are anything to go by, nobody did.

Not really sure what to do about that, really - marketing has never been one of the legs this thing stands on. I'd like the site to be in better shape, but I've been using that as an excuse for years. I'd like to be updating regularly again, but my workload presently prohibits that... which, as a starting point, is something I can eventually fix.

I'd also like to get to a point where I can write outside of a bar or coffee shop. That will probably take longer.

Or, perhaps, it'll happen concurrently.

Maybe it'll all happen concurrently.

Things usually do.

Comments re-enabled, CAPTCHA'd.

2010.03.12 @ 22:51 · · comment

Also turned off for all entries prior to the previous blog post. I would have preferred to leave 'em on, but I Hate Spam, and killing the ability to spam my old blog entries should go a long way towards turning the tide.

Comments are CAPTCHA'd and currently post straight to the site without email authentication. If the CAPTCHA proves an ineffective spam deterrent, I'll re-mandate the moderation queue.

Also, a Twitter feed has replaced the old progress box. I don't think I'll be using it much, but who knows? I thought the same about Facebook.

I do believe that's it for site mechanics. Maybe some formatting stuff for the First Edition metadata of The Dualist - I'll poke at that in a few minutes.

In the meantime, VICTORY!

Oh, and - if you feel like beating on the comments thinger, go for it. Feedback appreciated, etc.

Website v2010.1 Release Notes

2010.03.11 @ 18:35 · · comment

ATC site version 2010.1, code name "Furnace."

Participants

dmh - Aesthetic, slicing, initial assembly (html/javascript), font formatting and text-container CSS. Application of final template to MT plumbing.

vai - Created a partial "alternative" build that proved useful in finally freeing the site from tables.

ejp - Finalized the left-hand menu and FPNC, made things work for IE7+, stepped up as CSS mentat for several stages and essentially finished the base template. The man is a God.

Fun fact : the CSS file for the site has mutated quite a bit over the years. I got the original document from bda for use with my first MT blog. He got it from Dan Engler. I'd adapted it over the years to various site layouts, set it up for this one, and then pasted in a bunch of stuff from vai. Eric then hacked at it quite a bit.

GO TEAM CSS!

Build log

Q4 2009 and Q1 2010 - Paper design, with extensive thinking on how to add the content lost in the current build back into the site.

20100306 - Started on UI graphics. Realize some bits of the paper design are going to be a huge pain in the ass no matter how the site is implemented and streamline the proposed look to something closer to the previous version.

20100307 - Aesthetics "testing." xeno approves, and I start hating the previous build. Impatient to get the new UI up and running.

20100308 - UI graphics completed, sliced, optimized. Base tables-and-javascript template assembled and basic CSS formatting. Vai takes a poke. IE6 hates it.

20100309 - Further work done on CSS. Some formatting taken from vai's work of the previous day. Eric takes over as CSS go-to guy. IE6 continues to be a pain in the ass, everything works in Firefox, Chrome, Safari/Mac and Safari/iPhone. Most of the IE issues are resolved simply by switching to 7. Link buttons created.

20100310 - Fine-tuning of CSS by Eric with input from vai. Rollover images for all comic books and chapters created.

Major changes from the previous release

1. It's a lot darker, obviously. And prettier. The pretty isn't just my opinion - that's been the consensus of those who've volunteered opinions. It won't win any awards (the flavor is intentionally "web 1.0"), but it's certainly nicer than the previous release. It's also a lot more expressive - each section has its own header, and the space between the comic navigation buttons is finally being used for something.

2. Tables are GONE. Giggedy GONE. Yes.

3. While this thing is still image-heavy, all the text formatting and - more importantly - all the boxes that words reside in have been moved out of table cells and into CSS. This means the launch UI might get tweaked a bit after I see how it looks With A Variety Of Content.

4. Comments are OFF for the time being. You can thank the spam bots for that one - they'll come back later. Since commenting is its own mess of formatting it hasn't been a launch priority.

5. Transitional Voices has an icon.

6. The wiki is gone. It's been replaced with "universe," which is a self-contained blog similar to the old-old Lexicon. It's a bit sparse at the moment, but there's plenty of content from the old-old site that I can copy, revise, and paste back in, so it won't stay that way for long. Point of fact, "universe" is something of a priority. It should update to the front page along with the blog - if it doesn't, it just means I haven't gotten to it yet. Or I've been blogging more than I've been documenting. The major upside for me is that it handles like the rest of MT, which means I don't have to noodle with formatting for Yet Another Web Thing.

7. Old.atc is still around, if only for archival purposes. All of the old "hard to find" content that never made it over here in the previous release - all the stuff I'd intended to dump into a wiki at some point - will be integrated into the current website over the next...

Oh, fuck it. I'm not going to lie. I think it's a priority now but I will probably get distracted. There will be bits - Cast, at least. How quickly the rest of it makes it over is anybody's guess.

Testing

The development template was tested in the current build of Chrome, Firefox 3.5.x, Safari 4, IE6 (for laughs), and IE7 (for real, unfortunately). All issues worked out apply to the initial template only - some kinks may crop up when the template gets applied to the website. IE6 was given up on, and a redirect has been created. Think of it as an easter egg.

Wonkiness

1. Aside from flat-out abandoning IE6 and ignoring Netscape (Communicator 4.7 was a favored target of mine for awhile, and was the first browser I stopped giving a shit about), there's one display difference in IE7 that I haven't tested in IE8. It's not a deal-breaker, so I'm not worried about it.

2. I have no idea what this thing looks like in Opera, on the PSP, or anything other than the test platforms listed above. There may be wonkiness. As Google Analytics has indicated that some of you use these platforms to read ATC, any input would be appreciated.

Remaining

1. The one major issue on the backend to-do list is comment capability. For the time being that's been stripped out - I'll add it back in at some point in the near future. With any luck, the planned work will solve the comment spam problem that's been plaguing the site for the past few months.

2. Along with that, probably, some kind of twitter integration. I've been thinking on it for awhile, and I consider it a viable alternative to the old progress bar. Logging of material is something of an issue for me in other respects - it's the one area that's always been "fire and forget."

3. Oh, and. Uh... uhm. Content, obviously. But that's not a backend thing. Further CSS refinement will follow, along with the usual tweaks and broader testing and debugging that'll occur after the new site goes live.

4. Ads. That's what I was thinking of. The Wall Of Spam seems to be standard-issue for all other comics, so I suppose I should get around to slipping some of it in somewhere. As the site has run ad-free since inception, I can promise you this - any implemented ad thing will be either Below The Fold or respectfully unobtrusive.

5. Highest priority of the "remaining" TDL - CSS for Universe logos, images, notes, etc.

Bird is the word.

2010.03.11 @ 13:32 ·

Everybody's heard.

The head-desking issue from early this morning has been resolved. Using MT against itself to apply a CSS tweak that gets the job done and BLAM! - the comic nav bars display correctly, and comic navigation flows between books correctly.

Break, then finalize templates, then finalize formatting.

Update : Templates work. Had to step back to the heady days of Mercury and the old-old ATC website to get the Universe section functioning more or less as intended. Will work out the bugs when I have more content to put in place... and I'm going to need to insert some before I start finalizing the formatting.

Update 2 : Some Universe content has been seeded, and its CSS debugged. Assembly is down to Final Cleanup of formatting.

AUGH

2010.03.11 @ 01:44 ·

Working on this thing for 14 hours straight and there are still massive, massive issues. Issues I'm too fried to fix tonight.

Update : Guess what? The shit what's been griefing me a BUG. IN FIREFOX. (works fine in Safari, Chrome, and IE, etc)

Holy shit, etc.

Hopefully it can be fixed with CSS - it's that or re-name over 400 CMS entries.

Long story short : Apparently Firefox takes any two hyphens followed by an > as the end of a <!--. It's taking, for example, -4-.php"> as the --> to close out a comment - leaving the real --> hanging free, totally breaking the shit out of comic archives.

Bastards.

Porno Holocaust

2010.03.10 @ 20:27 ·

After some debugging, and "revise the CSS" added to the to-do list, the bulk of the site content has been converted to the new templates. Huzzah.

Snack break.

Then. THEN! Comic root pages, seed content for Universe, and CSS fixes.

Wow, I wasn't kidding.

2010.03.10 @ 18:20 ·

The site is busted - turns out the new CSS isn't as thorough as the old.

I'm going to finish template implementation before I fix that - it beats doing incremental updates as I find new and exciting bits of bustedness.

Speaking of - the blog has been re-templated, though Comments are disabled for the time being.

Breakin' the Site, Breakin' the Site

2010.03.10 @ 16:37 ·

All the necessary bits are in place.

Eric says the site validates (something I've never cared about), and vai says it looks good in Opera.

Build to commence shortly.

Order of operations:

1. Site root.

2. Blog.

3. Other existing site root-relevant bits.

4. Comic pages. This bit will be easy.

5. Comic subdomains. This bit will be trickier.

6. Make sure it all works.

7. Release notes and "final" CMS rebuild.

8. CSS revision and new site content.

Preflight.

2010.03.10 @ 14:50 ·

The list of Stuff What Needs Doing To The Template is shrinking rapidly. Things seem to be down to fine-tuning, followed by a couple of section-specific bits of CSS that won't be truly necessary until there's some content to work with.

Eric and vai have been kicking ass and chewing bubblegum. I should be in a position to start rolling out the base template later today, and hope to have the current website converted to the new look and feel tonight.

Re-implementation is going to involve tuning the CMS entries for book chapters - that'll be the only major change and challenge. Everything else will be cleanup, followed by New Stuff over time.

Website v.2010.1 development : Thunderdome!

2010.03.09 @ 18:45 ·

The development template is now table-free. TABLE. FREE!

For the first time in, well... ever.

Working slowly on debugging in IE. After that, moving on to cleaning up the steaming mess of javascript. Vai's CSS work from last night has proven invaluable, and I'm now pow-wowing with ejp. There are still a lot of little things to figure out, but it looks like development is on track to finish tonight, which means implementation will begin late tonight or early tomorrow.

This is just the template - there's a host of other problems I'll need to work out after things get working properly... but comments and an improved update box can wait until later.

Website v.2010.1 development continues

2010.03.09 @ 13:59 ·

Graphics and basic formatting are done, and the base template is in the same state that the previous template was in when I "committed" it to the site. Since that was a huge pile of work - and since it uses tables - today's major task will be doing what I can to transfer any or all of the old table layout into CSS.

I've made a bit of progress on that front myself, and vai took a crack at parts of it last night. The objective - for me, anyway - is to get this thing out the door at some point on Wednesday, so I'll have Thursday afternoon and evening to work the bugs out, Thursday night to bask in my victory, and Friday and the weekend to start seeding new content (and further refining the CSS).

So depending on how smoothly things go, this thing could be either Very CSS, or some combination of CSS, tables, and javascript, with an eventual CSS implementation following.

The horror, etc.

Website v.2010.1 development

2010.03.07 @ 15:56 ·

Sitrep -

The graphics framework has been created and is pretty much finalized. I've been bouncing this one off of IRC and the informed opinion is that it's a big improvement over the previous site version (v.7 or 2008.1). It is - I can't wait to get it implemented.

What needs doing-

1. Title graphics for major website sections and comic chapters. For this version they're now separate graphics, which will slightly lighten the load while navigating the comic chapters.

2. "Backfill" for title graphics. For the current version that's the bit with Thad and Val up top site-wide, or Whitehouse and Yang in DCR. While it's an aesthetically minor thing, I'm still in the process of narrowing it down to a selection of graphics that I like.

3. Chapter selection bits. The formatting thing I had in mind when I redid all of the covers for The Dualist. Still incompatible with the DCR covers and the current TV cover - something I'll need to figure out over the next few days.

How this thing's going to roll out-

1. Major UI graphics will be completed over the next day or two. Work will then begin on the javascript/CSS template.

2. That will then be uploaded and implemented, making the site "live."

3. Bugs will be worked out and additional changes/tweaks made as needed.

4. I'll get the damned commenting thing fixed, hopefully to my satisfaction.

5. With the base graphics and formatting rolled out, the focus will shift to adding (and re-adding) content to the site.

Last time around, I spent at least a week tormented by layout, before finally coming up with something that did the job, albeit not to my aesthetic satisfaction. The new look assembled itself in a few hours and is basically the same information layout as the old, only this time... I like it. It may still use tables - it ultimately depends on how easily the UI can be assembled with CSS.

Optimally, I expect the main UI to be rolled out by the end of the week, and enough content in the CMS to flesh out the new components by the end of the month. New content will be an ongoing process, which I don't expect to be finished for some time.

With any luck, the next major blog update will be 2010 release notes!

v.2010.1 IRC preview

2010.03.07 @ 15:48 ·

11:08 <@_Lasar> That 's not color, that's monochrome. Imagine a world where people never figured out that you could have computers display color images. Instead that universe went on to produce high-res amber monochrome screens.
11:08 <@_Lasar> That's your layout.
11:08 < solios> yes.
11:09 < solios> yes, it is.
11:09 < solios> you got a problem with that?
11:09 <@_Lasar> Nope.
11:09 < solios> \o/

Marching on March

2010.03.04 @ 17:46 ·

So much for February. What did I accomplish, ATC-wise? A bit of DCR script development, an initial draft of the first part of TV2 that has a viable shape but is going to require extensive rewriting and retooling to become useable, some deliberation on the shape of the website, a lot of bitching about CSS on IRC, and my first full UVW unwrap and texturing of a vehicle.

I've unwrapped bits before - notably the more difficult parts of the Aeon - but until this past weekend, I'd never done an entire ship by myself. It was more of a confidence building experiment than anything else - the ship in question has been rusting along with a few others (The Banshee, the Astra, as well as a tanker, cargo ship, corvette, passenger liner and cruiser all slated for appearance in TV.3) for quite awhile now. It feels good to have something done, even if it isn't the website, even if it's only going to show up in a few panels at most. Money shots after it shows up in-comic. We've already seen the passenger cabin in DCR.1, and the first external appearance will be a few pages from now in DCR.2.

So there's that, which doesn't have much to do with the website. It is an eyedropper expunged from the vast ocean that is the CG Backlog, so while nothing much happened on the web front in February, I did make a tiny bit of progress on CG assets. Combine that with the one-night crash modeling of Whitehouse's megaphone in January and I've managed a whopping two objects in two months.

I'm going to need to improve on that, obviously.

Which means I'm going to have to get to grips with things what have been dragging me down or otherwise sucking up my time lately, which also means getting realistic about the Order Of Operations, which means I really need to upgrade the website before I start waterboarding myself with 3d Studio MAX again.

Fortunately it's been sorted out on paper fairly extensively - and with some help from a couple of friends on IRC (who will get plenty of credit in the build notes), I'll be able to get over my Fear of CSS. Which puts "make the interface" next on the TDL.

It's been "next" on the TDL for a couple of weeks.

Fortunately, March is still Q1, and I set "ATC Website" as one of my major goals for Q1. I should be able to hit that for graphics and CSS - new content, well... that's another matter!

An upcoming unwanted "feature"...

2009.12.07 @ 02:15 ·

... will be either comment authentication/authorization or a CAPTCHA. I hate the piss out of those things but I hate the steadily growing volume of perversely "natural"-looking comment spam I've been getting of late a lot more.

At present, it seems the options are to make commenting a bit more difficult, keep weeding spam on a daily basis, or turn commenting off altogether.

If I've deleted a real comment in error (and at present I have no reason to think that I have), email me.

Domain Renewal Weirdness

2009.06.16 @ 11:18 ·

Apparently the ATC domain expired around 9am UTC today. I discovered this when I loaded the front page and noticed that all dualist.atc content was [?]. All subdomains unreachable but root works? Oh yeah - I'd stuck the server IP in my hosts file awhile back to work around a DNS issue and forgot about it.

I've hacked things on my end - I'll be able to update the site (not that any updates are pending) until the domain issue is resolved.

Bryan paid for renewal before the domain expired (we're good till 2011 according to WHOIS), so the lock and the nserver redirect to the provider's not-renewed subdomain is an anomaly that'll hopefully be sorted shortly.

If you've tried to load ATC recently and received a "Server not found" error or its equivalent instead, that's the cause.

Update, 2009.06.18 - Everything's back to normal. It was back to normal in most places yesterday afternoon, but my home DNS just recently got the memo.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Blog comment preview fixed (?)

2009.02.20 @ 16:30 · · 8 comments

Thanks to ATC reader bounce for putting me on the debug trail.

Long story short - the preview form was missing the contents of the mt.js file, whereas the entry pages weren't. So hitting "comment" instead of "preview" would work just fine, whereas hitting "preview" and then "post" would throw an error message, as the page was trying to pass a bunch of variables that it knew nothing about.

I could have stripped out this functionality, but I'd prefer to keep as much of the base MT commenting logic in place, should I want to activate the Captcha system, require readers to register in order to comment, or any of the other forms of Spam Control. The kind of arsenal I wish I had for DCR, really.

So, that's been fixed.

I'll make some aesthetic modifications in a few weeks - after Convergence has been re-finished, after I have a few other things done.

Any other problems I should know about?

Website v2008.1 Release Notes

2008.11.20 @ 18:43 · · 2 comments

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.

The Barn Door's Open.

2008.11.20 @ 17:59 ·

While the site's not completely finished yet. There's a lot of stuff missing - link buttons, some minor spit-shining, a lot of the about content, the wiki*, and most importantly, a good-sized stash of pages for The Dualist (Second Edition).

Least importantly, the site release notes. I'll get to those today or tomorrow and update the footer accordingly.

Everything critical is in place. All functionality is present.**

The rest is window dressing.

* Put off until 2009. Thank me later.

** Present but not necessarily working - the MultiBlog plugin that ships with MT4 has a funky habit of occasionally deciding it's not going to kick its update triggers. Fun!