Milestones

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Mar 122012
 

With a small site like this, it’s important for me to note the milestones I’ve reached to help me measure what I’ve accomplished so far. These milestones help me to validate my efforts and of course, motivate me to continue. For now these are purely personal milestones, though someday I hope to be counting milestones like 100th subscriber (I have one so far…Hi Lyne!)

The first big milestone was my 100th post back in December. I hit 200 last week, but the French comics bloat the number. Basically every strip counts for two posts, French and English. The 200th original post is still 48 posts away. That should be 10-12 weeks from now. Still, it won’t feel as special since the actual 200th post will be long past by then. But that’s just me…ANYHOO!

My next Animus milestone happens on Thursday when I post the 50th Animus Funny. Of course, I did something SUPER special for that one. I cheated. You’ll no doubt figure out what the cheat is when you see it.

The 100th strip will occur shortly before the one year anniversary of the site. I don’t want to be TOO tacky, so I’ll let the 100th strip pass by quietly…OR WILL I? I’m not even sure if the storyline that starts next week will be finished by then. I have the scripts written to strip 82 and I’ve still got some things to resolve before I can write the end.

Happy coincidence? The new member to the main cast I’m introducing drops in strip number 75. That’s June 12, 2012. Mark your calendars!

Where was I? I kinda went off track there. Oh right! Milestones! Yeah, the site’s one year anniversary will be the next big one after this Thursday’s 50th strip. I’ll have to think of something special to celebrate it. That’s seven months away. I’d better get cracking. Aw, who am I kidding? I’m such a procrastinator, that I’ll probably wait until the week before and then whip something cheap up because I’ll have run out of time to do anything better! 🙂 Tune in October 7th to see what I come up with!

What Happened?

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Mar 052012
 

I look like I should know all about computers and programming. Yeah, looks can be deceiving.

I like computers and what they can do. I use them plenty and I know enough to get by. I can figure things out if given the time and I have the inclination to do so (I often don’t).

Why am I mentioning this? Because for all that I should know, I still make colossal errors and recently, I committed a huge one:

I lost my site, not once, but twice. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after the first time, but you’d  think wrong!

But how did it happen?

It all started innocently enough. On Thursday (February 23rd), I got a message from WordPress that one of the plug-ins I was using (Manga+Press) had an update available. Up to that point, I’d never had any problems with updating plug-ins, so I updated without thinking twice about it. That was when the Funnies navigation buttons disappeared. The new version of Manga+Press used a new post type to distinguish comics and no longer recognized the old posts. And the new plug-in didn’t even work!

I tried other plug-ins that were developed to publish webcomics on WordPress and they all had issues. I couldn’t get the comics to show where I needed them to. They didn’t like the theme I was using. The Funnies wouldn’t show in my media library.

As I was playing around with them, I did SOMETHING that made my site go blank. I couldn’t figure out what. I thought I had done damage to my WordPress files, so I tried uninstalling and reinstalling on the server. It didn’t occur to me that I should make a back-up first. Don’t do this! WordPress didn’t recognize any of my old files and lost all my posts. I was upset. I spent a good deal of my weekend fretting about this.

Then on Monday (February 27th) I had a rare intelligent thought: Ask Bluehost (my web provider) for a backup restore. They responded with three backups I could use. I chose the oldest so I would also undo the plug-in update. They restored the files, but WordPress only reverted back a few hours (I still don’t get this). The comics issue remained.

I thought I could deal with it. But my files all looked messy. I HAD to fix things (I’m obsessive that way). And I tried. Only I made things worse. On Wednesday (February 29th) I screwed up WordPress again. And this time the backup restore didn’t work. My tech support guy tried to restore the WordPress database, but that didn’t work either. I would need to start the site all over.

I hesitated. Did I really want to do all that work again? Any picture files would be okay. I had them all saved on my computer. But there were a lot of posts that I wrote directly on the site. I had no backups of them. Well the site is back up and the content is returning, so obviously I persevered. Alls I can say (and I said this on Facebook earlier) is, “Thank goodness for Google caches!” Whatever posts I was worried about losing, I found. I saved them all on my hard drive and now I just need to repost them. Some (okay, most) old news posts won’t be coming back though…it ain’t news anymore.

So what have I learned?

  • I’m dumb. Really dumb. Spectacularly so, in fact.
  • Backup the site regularly. Turns out WordPress has an option for this. I’ll be making use of it from now on.
  • If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If I’m happy with the way a plug-in works, why update it?
  • Write locally, post globally. Instead of writing directly in WordPress, I’ll write in Wordpad on my computer and then copy and paste to WordPress on the server. If anything happens to the WordPress database, I won’t lose all my posts again.
  • This site means a lot to me. Not many people read the site (yet), but I was devastated at the thought of losing all the work I’ve put into it.

Replacing the Original 15

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Feb 132012
 

Gah! I had written this whole post and set the timer to go up at 6am this morning…and forgot to hit the schedule button! Foiled again!

Anybody who happened to read the Funnies archive from the beginning yesterday will have noticed a change (assuming you had read them from the beginning before that is). The first five strips have been replaced! Eventually the next ten strips will also be replaced as well.

The first fifteen strips were drawn using a variety of drawing programs as I was trying to figure out how best to do things. Starting with Funny 016 I switched to Manga Studio Debut since it offers a whole mess of panel layouts and tools for adding text balloons. That was a learning process in itself and it’s taken me a while to get used to it. At the time I didn’t want to go back and redraw the first fifteen strips, preferring to continue with new material. Obviously that’s changed now.

My desire is to collect the Funnies in trade paperbacks at some point. The first 15 strips were going to cause a problem, because the layout was different. I could have decided to do a little editing and paste the panels into MSD, but to be honest, they were poorly drawn (even by my standards) and turned out somewhat pixellated. I can’t imagine that they would have printed very well.

I’ve been experimenting with ways to draw certain characters and they look a lot better now than they did a few months ago, especially Sass. This way the artwork will be a little more consistent. There may still be a few jarring strips here and there, but I find that overall the archive looks a lot better.

But what will happen with the original fifteen (O15) strips? Well, I keep everything that I draw for the site for referencing purposes. Since I like to show the evolution of the work, I’ll probably add the O15 to the artwork section of the site when I finish replacing them all, so that people can see the difference (like I did for the original first strip).

ORIGINAL                                 REVISED
  

Writing New Funnies Soon

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Feb 062012
 

Back in October, I wrote a number of strips for the site. How many? A little over 50. (I drew the 50th strip this past weekend) Apart from the holiday strips I wrote once I decided I wanted to have holiday strips, I haven’t had to write any new strips since then. That’s about to change as I’m coming up on the end of my script queue. The scripts I have left to draw are the setup to a big trip to the Crimson Coast storyline where a new cast member will be introduced. I’ve written her introduction strips actually, what I need to do is write the strips of the journey to the Crimson Coast. That means I have to come up with traveling gags. I’m not sure how well that’s going to go.

At last count, Cyran was my most used character, though Nektara and Todrick are about to pass him. Cyran is the designated straight fur for everyone except Todrick. He’s also the fur most likely to address the reader, although honestly they all talk to the reader a good deal.

Todrick and Nektara are a duo. It’s hard for me to imagine using one without the other, though Todrick and Red Rich will be teaming up in the Crimson Coast storyline.

I have a Barnaby storyline I want to do eventually, but I wanted to wait until the characters are more established before I get to that one.

I need to come up with something for Zoë and Popkin. I feel I’ve neglected them. Since she first was introduced, Zoë has been mostly limited to group scenes. I gave her a couple of lines I’d intended for Cyran just so she could have some face time.

Maybe someday I’ll even get around to introducing Copley.

A Poem on Content Quality

 Carja's Corner  No Responses »
Jan 302012
 

I was thinking (always dangerous) about my blog.
And then I thought about it some more.
And these thoughts I came to realize
Were all thoughts I’d thought before.

A lot of the blogs I write have no point
And the things in them that I spout
Well you see, I chose them quite simply
Because I didn’t know what else to write about.

My blog is my little corner of the site
To write what’s in my head.
But sometimes there’s nothing good in there
And junk comes out instead.

I have no news to talk about
Or at least none I feel free to share.
But it’s not like many people read this blog
So maybe I shouldn’t care.

I’m open to suggestions, friends
If there’s something about which I should write
Just send me a line to tell me
And I’ll try to add it to the site!

*insert beatnik poetry finger snapping*

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