What’s New: Visual Bookmark

Maybe you have noticed a small bar below the previous version of this webcomic site and others around. That bar usually displays three text options like “Tag Page | Go to Tag | Clear” (ComicPress) or “Bookmark | Return | Clear” (Webcomic). This little bar allows you to “bookmark” the page you’re reading, so you can stop reading, do your business, and resume the reading from the page you bookmarked on.

But the usual not-ideal placement of that bar and its non-obvious usefulness makes that just a few readers ever use it, or even notice it.

That’s really unfortunate, as I find those tools really useful when you’re a new reader trying to catch up through the archive of a webcomic. So I decided to create my own version of those bookmark tools.

Visual Bookmark

The idea behind Visual Bookmark is to emulate as close as possible what you would be able to do with a comic printed on paper. As you can see in the image above (or browsing through the Robomeks pages) the top right corner of each page is now slightly bent. If you place your mouse over it it’ll bend totally, and will revert back if you move your mouse away. To bookmark that page simply click on that corner. Once you do so, any other page will show a little icon besides that corner that reads “go”. Clicking that icon will bring you back to the page you bookmarked. To remove the bookmark simply go to the bookmarked page and click the bent corner again. Bookmarking a page removes the previous bookmark automatically.

As you see, it works exactly as it would with a paper comic or a book. OK, maybe you don’t do that to your comics, but that’s what I do.

The goal of this tool is to be as self-explanatory as possible. A new reader should be able to spot it and deduce its purpose by simple observation or a couple tries. I also tried to make it as unintrusive as possible, as it’s potentially the kind of thing that goes unnoticed for some time but once you are aware of it you can’t keep noticing it, even be annoyed by it.

Going slightly technical

This feature needs javascript and cookies activated and accepted, just so you know. Also, it stopped working once I placed it on the live server, and it wasn’t until today that I found WP-Super Cache to be the one to blame. That’s why it wasn’t implemented since day one, which was my original plan, and why I’ve had to deactivate that plugin in order for this to work (cookies+cached pages, bad things happen). The only drawback is that maybe you’ll find this site to be slightly slower. But with the relatively low amount of traffic around here that shouldn’t be a problem.

Your turn

As I’ve said already, I’ve tried my best to make it as obvious and unintrusive as possible, but if you have any idea to improve it just let me know. Maybe it’s too big? Too small? The “go” text isn’t clear enough? Does it get more annoying than useful over time? New readers won’t know how it works?

Just tell me. Maybe we can all make it even better.