What’s New: Visual Bookmark

Posted by Chaves 2 years ago | Comments Off

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.

Poor little thing...

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

Visual Bookmark in all its states

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.

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What’s New: RSS feeds and URLs

While some of the old links are still operative the change to a new domain has made some of them obsolete. There’s even a couple new ones you’ll probably be interested in. Let’s see where’s what now.

URL changes

Let me first list you the most important changes in URL addresses:

I’ve placed several redirections already that should make finding the new locations easier. For instance, http://robomeks.com now leads directly to the Robomeks section. I’ve also tried to remap the popular http://robomeks.com/lang/en/ entrance, but my limited knowledge of regular expressions and .htaccess tinkering don’t seem to be enough to achieve it. I’m planning to try with PHP and/or META redirects later.  (solved)

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What’s New: Comic Navigation

The move to Catolate has brought not only new aesthetic changes, but some important new features that affect functionality. Some of them are minor, some of them are significant. But, for now, let me concentrate on the one I consider most important: the new ways to browse through the comic.

New Comic Navigation Options

Now you have more options to read the comic than the usual text links that you’re used to. Let me list them:

  • Clicking the comic page
    Now clicking on the comic page image  file will direct you to the next published page for the series.
  • Using the keyboard arrow keys
    You can now browse through the comic pages using the arrow keys in your keyboard. Pressing the Left Arrow key will lead you to the previous page and pressing the Right Arrow will show the next one. Also, you can press both Shift and the Left Arrow key to go to the first page, and Shift+Right Key to go to the latest.
  • Using the thumbnails besides the comic
    You’ll see that in the left and right part of the comic page there’s now a series of thumbnails showing the previous and next five pages in that particular series. Hovering over a thumbnail will highlight it and display it in its totality. Clicking it will lead you to that particular page.
    Strangely enough, this particular feature isn’t implemented in any of the webcomic engines available for WordPress, so I had to program it myself (first for ComicPress, back in December, and finally porting it to Webcomic). In any case, I think it’s simply essential to make reading through the hundreds of pages easier and it definitely makes things more organic, making it closer to what would be achieved if this would be a regular comic printed on paper.

As you can see, now it’s easier to read Robomeks than ever. This is all for now, I’ll deal with the other changes in following posts.

Welcome to Catolate

Welcome to the new milestone.

This one brings a bunch of important things: new domain, new site design and functionality, not to mention a brand new webcomic project, along with other features I’ll reveal in the following days. The amount of work for all this to be achieved has been, and still is, considerable so some tweaking and waiting time is to be expected. Right now you can enjoy a series of teasers that will be published regularly, and that should give you an idea about what’s to come (and, hey, they’re quite pretty too).

So, welcome and stay tuned. I’ll explain what has changed and what’s to come in a series of posts, the first of which should be published below now. Just let me thank you for your patience while all this develops.

Tip: Segmenting visitors by screen resolution in Google Analytics

article_ga_screenresolutions_2

The problem

I needed to answer this question: How many readers will be affected by the bigger size of the new site design?

Basically, I needed to know how many visitors are using a screen resolution higher or lower than the one I had in mind, which is 1280×800. A high proportion of visitors with a lower resolution than that would mean that I’d better reconsider downsizing the site to, say, a 1024 width, as it’ll impact negatively the usability of the site for them.

Fortunately, Google Analytics has a nice feature that can answer that question as long as you want to deal with regular expressions. And, fortunately again, I’ve done the hard work for you.

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