Fresh Off The Presses
on August 28, 2011Hi there! It’s possible you’ve noticed a change in how the site looks. I’ve always prided myself on how observant my readers are.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that over the past several weeks I’ve been building a new Lit Brick site using Comicpress, a pimped-out WordPress created for webcomics. There are several reasons I bit the bullet on this project, many of which should be readily apparent. My original site was very low tech, to say the least. The system running the site could create navigable comic archives, and that was about it. There were no bells. There were certainly no whistles.
This new system has a lot more going on under the hood, all of it a significant improvement. Aside from the obviously new design (which I find brighter and more friendly than before), a pile of new features have become available to both myself and you fine people. First, the archives.
Every single strip in the archives (363 as of this Monday) has been tagged and titled, the practical upshot of which is that finding a particular character or author has just become incredibly simple. The “Top Authors” section to your right is just the tip of the iceberg. Wanna see every strip with Molly in it? Easy-peasy. How about every piece of literature originating from America? No problem. Most of the tag-related fun can be had by visiting the massive Tag Cloud, though I’ve linked to some of the more important tags (Donation Strips, Guest Comics, Christmas Party, etc) in the “Bonus Material” section on your right.
Additional improvements to the archives include: a plain list of every strip ever (in backwards order, starting with today) so people can easily catch up if they’ve been gone for a couple weeks; a detailed list of major multi-part stories; a button to randomly select any strip in the archive; a button to quickly share a strip via any of the social networks; and a fully-functional search engine that will crawl through the tags, titles, and commentaries (though not the strips themselves – yet).
Other, more subtle, changes include the “donation” button on every single page and a new ad-free RSS feed that you should adopt, since I’m not sure if the current one will continue to function.
There are other new little bits and bobs I’m sure you’ll notice, but I won’t bother explaining them all. In any event, I hope you enjoy the new site, and let me know if something is amiss.
(For more information about the new commenting system, check out this additional blog post.)
Kudos on the new site design. I like the character banner at the top, although from a storyteller’s perspective I find it kind of weird that the primary character in the logo was recently “killed off” and probably won’t be appearing too much in the future.
On the other hand, from a fan’s perspective, I find it exciting that the primary character in the logo was recently “killed off” and take that as an indication that she will be appearing more often in the future than previously implied.
Secondarily, for some *inexplicable* reason, I can’t look at that banner without having the word “vulva” pop into my head. Does that happen to anyone else?