Rita was recently critiqued on a comics board I’m on. In the various comments, a few themes emerged. One of them was “I want an archive page full of thumbnails!”. I didn’t quite do that, but I think I did something that better addresses the underlying problem of wanting to flip back and forth between pages a whole ton: I almost completely ditched the single-page model, in favor of full chapter views.
I’ve also switched out some of the underlying code – I moved from the ComicPress plugin to its successor, Comic Easel. I built a new theme, found a plugin to fill a hole in which Comic Easel was willing to generate, made a custom icon font for the arrows and did some CSS and PHP hackery to make it work just right.
Let me know what you think of the new look, especially if it seems broken on your browser – all I’ve tested on is the latest Mac versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. I want to have a good reading experience for new visitors who come in via the Kickstarter!
(Stuff I know is not done: the about page is still the same mess it was beforehand, blog archive needs space between posts, links to other comics are gone. I need to fix a thing under the hood though it’s not too high priority as I’ve always cached aggressively. I also suspect some tricks aren’t gonna work on every web designer’s favorite browser. Also I need to donate some bucks to the dude behind Comic Easel.)
This change is, of course, at the expense of the next page. It’s about half done, and not especially complex. I’m hoping to get it up Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday.
Hey EgyptUrnash (I’ll use your WU name for lack of a better one). First, small thing I noticed. I hadn’t used the chapter reader before, and I like it, but I had to resize my screen (down to 90%) to make it fit vertically so that I could just scroll to the right to read it. I know that there are widgets or code things (I am not a webmaster) that can make the page auto size to the current window, so you might want to consider that.
Thanks! Hmm, I’ll ponder that. I worry that if I add something to do that the text will become too small to read; we’ll see what happens. That’s gonna depend a LOT on the screen size.
Psst: a couple of links (‘under the hood’ and ‘some tricks’) appear to have trailing quotation marks as part of the URL, breaking at least the latter (the former only goes to an anchor, so you at least get to the page but not necessarily to your target).
Also, I’m curious: how will new pages be handled under this scheme? Can you set a ‘horizontal anchor’ that takes the reader to the appropriate place on the page, or will we just have to hop to the far-right side of the page?
Oooh, fixed the links.
I’m still deciding how new pages will work! The RSS feed will still trickle out single pages on their own as I draw ’em.
Jason had suggested a “skip one page to the right” nav button when I showed it to him last night; I might try implementing that with a smidge of JS, along with”beginning/end of chapter” buttons.
Did some more work on it.
– added a very obvious cue to SCROLL RIGHT!!! on the first page
– changed that thing I mentioned “under the hood”
– changed cache plugins, turned on a lot of stuff that makes YSlow very happy.
I strongly advise there should always be a single book-markable URL that takes you to the latest comic. Adding extra clicks to someone’s routine webcomics browse may make them drop the comic as ‘too hard to read’.
Good idea. I added a “latest page” link to the top bar.
Many thanks for this! I open 50+ comic tabs all at once when I go to read my favorites. It sucks having a comic loaded to the wrong page when I get to that tab. It’s a minor thing to have to click through to the latest update, and I know some authors NEED the extra advertising impression, but I still am thankful for those that provide direct bookmarkable links to the most recent content.
I am ALL ABOUT minimizing clicks. I hate it when something I do regularly requires multiple actions!
I love the new format. It really lets me see the different world-lines as lines now.
Yeah! I was reading the whole thing on my big monitor last night, and I was kinda blown away at how well I could see the different worlds twining around each other. I’ve never really looked at a few pages next to each other, full-size, before, for all that I routinely have the previous page to the left of the one I’m working on in Illustrator.