Of Permalinks and Apartments
I just finished changing a bit around for the site: There's a new permalink structure, since I finally got around to making the header play nice with it. Also, there's a new cache system, which should speed up the site loading a bit, even though it might slow down the updating by a minute or two.
Translation: Faster loading. New comics will be a minute late (assuming they're on time to begin with. Ha.)
As for the "apartments" side of this post, enjoy:
The new header
To all 20 of you that still show up on the SEDiverse:
Eh... right now the header's kinda frelled, but... bleh. I've already been working on it for the last 5 hours, so bah humbug. I'll fix the contrast and tranlucency problems when I get back up.
You'll also notice that the normal "menu" is gone. Yeah... no sense in having it while the new header does the same thing. Oh, but you liked the navigation buttons on it?? ...Bleh. I do have keyboard navigation for the comic on this site, you know. And there's still the links under the comic, too. Might have to look for them though, since the text is black right now.
Hey, I'm working on it!!
And, at least there's a link to the forums up there now.
PhysOrg.com and a couple other things
I am seriously loving this site. Expect me to be writing some blog stuff about articles I find on here:
If you like sciency stuff, or science news. That's is the place to go. If you aren't that big in the science though,... it might not be the friendliest place for you; The dialog is almost entirely written using the scientific usage of words like 'theory', 'controversy', and such. So, if you're used to the layman usages, you mind find it a bit confusing. However, where it ends depends on where you stop, so don't let a bit of a setback discourage you. Read on and learn! FOR SCIENCE!!
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Next up, just to have this on the main page for a while: SED IS UPDATING 5 TIMES A WEEK NOW. Be sure to come back every day. Please. For the love of Science.
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Two new shirts are in the shirt shop now. A new Robin shirt, and a random funny shirt involving a certain rubbery mystery man. The Robin poster is live in the poster shop as well.
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I'm thinking that starting on New Year's I'd like to get a few other people to write articles on here, in the areas of Science, Politics, Religion, Entertainment Reviews, and Comedy. Blaze is the first person I'm going to ask (and I suppose this could be considered asking), along with Bergasms (for sciency stuff mostly), and Monster (for Comedy mostly). I say 'mostly' for Bergasms and Monster because I'd be telling them to write whatever they feel like... In return, contributors would get... uh... I dunno... Blaze gets free books (in general), Bergasms... lives in australia, so I dunno what to do there,... and Monster gets to plug her comicy works and whatever else she likes to do.
It wouldn't be like a job though. It would be more like "Hey, you wanna talk about something? here ya go!" or "As long as you're puttin something on your blog, why not put it here too so people can talk about it?".
And this is all part of my whole "Let's make the SEDiverse be a place not just about a comic, but also about community and articles and whatnot. Laugh, Learn, Live, FOR SCIENCE!!"
I dunno, the idea is still in it's infancy at the moment.
Tools of the Trade v3.1
I was asked what combination of tools and setup do I use for the comic... and that made me laugh. This is the first site overhaul I've done where I didn't immediately throw up some documentation on the tools I'm using. So, you know, figures! Either that or, yeah, I get asked because I didn't post up the tool list that I normally do. I dunno, either way, I really should post all this stuff up again! (Normally, this information is available on the "About" page, by the way. Once I finish overhauling that, the current setup will usually be listed there.)
I use two different computers for making the comic, so I'll list of equipment and stuff first, then jump into settings from there:
The Toshiba Satellite Tablet PC (Courtesy of the Chinchilla):
Windows XP Professional
Adobe Photoshop CS3 (For almost everything)
Sketchbook Pro 2.0 (For quick sketches / some fillers)
The Undead Desktop (Also known as 108):
Windows XP Professional
Adobe Photoshop 7 (!) (For texting the comic / facemarks)
Microsoft Office 2003 (For the books)
Adobe Acrobat/Distiller (For packaging things into PDF)
Wacom Sapphire Tablet (They stopped making these like... 5 years ago.)
Now, on to Photoshop settings!!
Base_Template: 1605 x 2700 Pixels @ 300 Pixels per inch (5.35"x9") in RGB (Converted to CMYK during distillation to PDF)
Normal Drawing Brush: 9 Pixel Hard Round, Normal Mode, Full Opacity and Flow
Normal Eraser Tool: 19 Pixel Hard Round, Normal Mode, Full Opacity and Flow
Notes!!
- As you can see, I don't work in Mac Environments.
- Pages are resized to 600x1009px, bilinear resampling, jpg, quality 8
- The thinner grey lines/shading are done with the pressure sensivity. I rarely change the brush size.
- Fonts used: DIGITALSTRIP @ 24px (Standard Font), Space Toaster, Curlz MT, Stencil STD, Lithos Pro. I don't text with CS3, so I can't tell you what the font sizes are in pts.
- Method for achieving that "SED look" is to draw with basic shapes, then subtract from them with the eraser. So rather than drawing say, ears, on a character, just draw a black blob then eraser until you have what you want. After that, then you sketch shading on top.
- The Tablet PC and everything on it is courtesy of The Chinchilla. He's been trying to help me get everything back on the tracks again, and he more or less gave me the Tablet PC after he loaned it to me for a week. In his words, I used it more in that week than he did in the like, 4 years he had it. It was good timing too, because the Wacom Sapphire had more or less decided to start going through its final death throes.
- But it meant I had a new tool I needed to learn how to use. And while now I can see what I'm drawing with the TabletPC, it also lags in a way that the wacom never did, so as I'm drawing I have to think ahead and just imagine that I drew the line... Then wait a second or two and pop! the line appears.
- So, Wacom: Doesn't Lag, but can't see what you're drawing. TabletPC: Lags, but you can see what you're drawing. ...Either way, I need to get a Cintiq.
Services Used:
Lulu.com for PrintOnDemand and digital book sales
Printfection.com for PrintOnDemand shirt sales
Projectwonderful.com for Ad Services
Imagekind.com for Posters
JustHost.com for webhosting
wordpress with comicpress for the main site
SMF 1.1.xx for the forums
And that's pretty much everything I can think of offhand. I feel like I'm forgetting something important though...
The Skinny
New site and whatnot. Changed webhosts at more or less the last second.
After changing, found out the new host isn't all that easy to change everything over to. But, there's new scripting languages, so it gives me the chance to upgrade everything. So, everything's been upgraded.
Now, I know you guys will miss the old site, but seriously, this is for the best. The new site will have less downtime and cause less headaches for me in general.
The forums have been changed too, for the same reasons. Aside from modifying the templates and putting in a global login system, I'm probably not going to be doing much modification, like I did with the old site.
Why? Well, I had to modify the old site so much because the basic programs were crap. Now the basic programs are pretty all encompassing, so I don't need to do it.
And, since I'm trying to increase the speed of the site, and stop the lag timeouts, I'm not customizing much of the navigation, with icons or images, because of it slowing things down.
Eventually I might add a bit more customization, but for the moment this is it.
Sorry to have it be a bit bare, but on the other hand, the comics will be there, the site will be stable, and on my end, I won't have to spend so much time troubleshooting everything and ducttaping it back together.
[On the Side: Donate Plus is still broken, so there still isn't a donation wall or anything. Still trying to fix that. I think the new host might be blocking fsockopen like Yahoo was. I asked tech support "Are you blocking the fsockopen function?" and they replied "Thank you for notifying us of this. Good luck!" ...Somehow that doesn't fill me with hope.]
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