6:31pm

One of the most important aspects of a webcomic site would be how to represent a comic to the reader, sight unseen.

Inspired by this post, I developed a simple “Preview Grid” that took a few pages from the comic, cropped and reduced them and displayed them on the front page. That didn’t seem very clear, the large comics image was reduced too much to give an idea of what the comic looks like.

Now I’m considering a grid or a row of sample images, cropped but not reduced—which would be more abstract but give a better example of the drawing style in the comic.

Another option is to have the creator upload a sample image, but one thing I find frustrating in webcomics is to click on a beautifully-drawn, carefully-rendered, colored and airbrushed logo image or ad button, to find a crudely drawn B&W comic. I’d like to represent the actual pages of the comic to the reader.

1:50pm

There's not a lot to visually show for it, but I got a number of significant bugs worked out yesterday. Created a new temporary logo and added a splash of color to the page design.

The most significant thing (actually very simple) was that I added the first version of the "Start where you left off" feature. This would let you pick up any webcomic on the site, read it for a bit, and then come back later (days, weeks, months) and pick up where you left off. Everyone I've talked to has been enthusiastic about this idea and I know I'd love to have it on comics I read.

Right now it's extremely rudimentary--it just shows the first new page since your last signin date. In the future I'll be updating it so it actually tracks which pages you've read and which you haven't.

I've been futzing around with the comics display page for a long time now, I need to get a rough draft of the home page done, I'm tired of looking at the current homepage.

Jeff

3:23pm

Still looking for work.

In other news, I've updated the comics application I'm working on to include a link and RSS feed for all comments from a particular comic. That's just a minor addition, but I'm glad I got it worked out.

The single most important page on the site, the individual comics page display, is probably 80% complete. The navigation between pages, to other comics and to related tags is basically done. The next step is the navigation options by list of pages and (eventually) a calendar view. The navigation by list of pages is going to be fairly simple, at least until I work out how to add chapter headings. The calendar view will have to wait a bit as well.

The second most important set of pages is the process of adding or editing a new page, with adding/editing a new comic being a close third.

The way I see it, the one thing every visitor to the site will want to do is to view comics pages. That's what the site is for, after all.

For the smaller subset of comics creators, the most common behavior will be adding a new installment to their comic. The next most important behavior (if not literally the next most common) will be adding a comic itself.

Once those behaviors are robust and at least 90% good to go, the other features like friends lists and so on can be introduced.

Jeff

5:12pm

As of this afternoon, the new user and new comics processes are working properly. The new user process had a couple of bugs in it yesterday, but it seems to be functioning now.

The new comics process is a new addition. I've created a multi-step process when you add a new comic.

It works like this:

basic | add pages | edit pages | logo | describe | publish | congratulations

Basic Information

You enter your basic information about the comic here. The comic's name, who it's created by, and its web alias. The name and web alias must be unique, and the web alias must be a single word with no spaces or punctuation in it. (I haven't added that validation yet, I need to do that still).

Add pages

Once you've set up the basic info, you're prompted with five file input boxes, where you can upload the first five pages of your comic. Right now it's the first five pages only, but I'm thinking I may let you keep adding indefinitely at this point, so you can go ahead and add your whole comic here if you want.

Edit pages

You're then shown the thumbnails for the pages you uploaded, along with fields for the page Name, Description and Publish date (all optional). If you don't set the publish date, it's set to the current date.

Logo

Then you upload a logo image for the comic, and confirm that it's correct. If you want to change it, you can upload a new one, the process advances when you're satisfied.

Describe

Here you give the copyright information and add some tags to describe your comic. The tags function isn't wired up yet, but it will also include some text explaining that this is how you can define the genre or genres of your comic so people can find it more easily.

Publish

Then you tell it how often your comic is updated ("weekly", "daily", "whenever I feel like it") and give the publication date for the whole comic. Click on Publish and you're done.

Congratulations

The last page gives you the option to edit the comic's info, add a page, or go back to the home page.

I'm thinking I may move the "add pages" section to be the last step, or second to last step, but I'm not sure. "Publish" should be the very last step, but that may consist of simply viewing a summary of your comic's information, (name, alias, byline, description, copyright, logo, update schedule, publication date, and number of pages) and clicking "Publish".

I haven't done any visual styling on these pages so they're still very simple. They won't change too much, but there's a bit more visual design work to do on them.

I also need to create the Edit Comics process, which will compile most of that information onto just a few pages accessible from a single Manage Your Comic screen.

Jeff