Navigation and comic pages – fixed and restored
I’ve finally fixed the navigation problem that was including the news posts along the comic pages when you were browsing through the “next”, “previous”, etc links. It was just a minor bug of the beta version of ComicPress I’m using. I’m guilty free for once! In fact, this is right now probably the only beta version of CP around that has that issue fixed. And all this just for you. Don’t you feel loved?
The other major thing that needed to be done, the conversion of the comic files, has finished already. Those damn 75 pages have been opened in their glorious and heavy 300dpi along with another document with their respective texts, pasted the text from that file for both languages, adjusted the text positions, pasted the “watermark” header and footer from a previously edited document, resized to 72 dpi, exported as JPG, uploaded one language version directly through ftp and the other using CPM where I had to previously delete the file for the given post where the comic page would appear, edited the post to include the new image and finally save it. All this done 75 frigging fraking zloking times. Yes, it sucks. And it’s taken a helluva time. Particularly when it has been done with a 5 years old laptop.
But now everything should be fine and working as expected.
The good old days
You may have already noticed that, previously, the pages were in PNG format, with transparent background. The transparency was there to allow the stripped white-green background to be seen, giving the feeling of the pages being printed over old perforated computer paper (not that anyone noticed that, though). The texts, both for English and Spanish, were in fact separated files, both PNG and both with transparency. They were placed overlapping the comic page file, so the end result was the same as when you have the texts built in the image. This was done for some good reasons.
It allowed me to have just a single comic file with all the art, so, if a change in the art, balloons or whatever needed to be done I just had to tweak that single file and the changes would reflect on all language versions. Also, the files had ultralight sizes, allowing me to correct typos for any language with extreme ease.
There were downsides, though. Probably the most annoying was that the text files loaded faster than the image file. So you always got to read the texts before seeing the full page, which borked all the surprise factor, among other things. It also meant that the comic thumbnails for both the pages and the RSS feed were void of text, which made the pages look weird in that context.
Why using third party tools sometimes suck
Until now, the pros and the cons where quite balanced, so I’ve never had the need to change the way comic pages were “built”. But, alas, the new CP version has forced me to recreate all the tweaks that allowed me to do that, along several other hacks I made in the previous version of the site, and, I tell you, that can be challenging at best, frustrating more than usual and tiresome for sure. So, well, why rowing against the flow?
The new CP version contains several improvements. For instance, it allows me to use the multilingual feature just adding a couple variables. It’s so simple that I don’t dare to call that a “tweak”. The storylines feature makes my “Chapters” and other tweaks that involved the hacking of some core files obsolete. And so on. The way I implemented the multilingual comic pages was a bit overcomplicated and, who says tomorrow CP won’t change again forcing me to go through the tweaking process once more? So, there you have it. I decided to go through the slow, painful process of the file format conversion for the better on the long run.
JPG saves the day
Now the pages are in JPG format. While the PNG format has lots of interesting and unique features I just felt that JPG was more suited to the pages. Among other things it gets rid of the annoying pixelated look when using color gradients (PNGs use a limited color palette). On the other hand, the JPG file type makes everything blurry but, well, that’s the trade-off. The comic pages now include the texts so there are two files per page, one for each language available. No more spoiler text before the image. No more muted thumbnails.
Well, that’s ended being another wall of text of mine, but now you know every single reason for one of the most important changes that have happened around lately… I mean in this site. I leave the World to Obama.
See you soon.
