Entries tagged with website

Crossposts: http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/229322.html

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alaska,
website

(no subject)

I posted a brief write-up of my Summer Arts Festival class on my website: http://laylalawlor.com/wordpress/blog/2013/07/26/summer-arts-festival-2013/. I've just finished ANOTHER redesign -- basically just skinning it with a different, more graphical Wordpress theme, and deleting the chattier, more bloglike posts from the website (they're all mirrored here anyway). For awhile I intended the website to be my main blog, but all that ended up happening was that I used it as ANOTHER blog mirror, and blogging the same posts in three places is just silly. Especially when most people seem to read them on LJ/DW anyway.

So this will continue to be my main blog, while I'll do an occasional "article-style" post for the website (graphical! detailed!) when something of artistic/authorial importance happens. But I'll link to it from here, so you won't miss anything.

Or, shorter: LJ/DW is for socializing, website is for professional stuff. Easy enough. :D

Crossposts: http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/202028.html

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Testing the WordPress crossposter

Today I’m testing various crossposting options between the new WordPress blog and LJ/DW. The Livejournal Crossposter plugin (despite the straightforward name, it’s one of at least a half-dozen, and the second one I tried) is awesomesauce. First of all, despite the name, it works with LJ clones as well, and while it can only be set up to crosspost to one other blog, turns out I don’t have to crosspost to both LJ and DW — when I crosspost only to DW, the DW blog automatically picks up my post and crossposts to LJ. I’ve also tested editing and deleting posts, both of which work like a charm across all three sites.

I don’t plan to crosspost everything. The WordPress blog is mainly going to be for writing/creative process stuff and project updates (all of which will be mirrored to my other blogs when I post them, which means you can follow wherever you prefer). But I’m delighted with how seamless this is — one click of a button and bing!, my post pops up in all three places with appropriate footers and tags and everything.

*clicks*

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/200212.html

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Kismet (non) updation

Well, first of all, Sun-Cutter is not going to resume on Monday. The Kismet LJ feed CLAIMS that there is a new page, but it's a glitch (mine, not the computer's -- I had a page set to update today and forgot, so it was only up for about 5 minutes 'til I discovered and pulled it).

I do have two pages done, but I want a bigger backlog than that, because as I have learned over the last six months, I don't seem to be able to switch gears between fiction and comics very effectively. And most of my creative energy has been going into fiction lately (and this will continue for the near future). So, long story short, without a bigger backlog of pages, I'm just going to be right back in this exact same boat before too long. In order to get a chunk of pages done, I need to carve out a week or two that's devoted to doing nothing but the comic, and I wasn't able to do that in July. And I would be looking at another updating interruption in October anyway, since I have travel plans that month.

So, rather than stopping and starting all over the place, I'm going to tentatively (but optimistically!) aim for resuming updates in November. If the autumn gets away from me (as it so often does; it's one of the busiest times of year), then I'll push it back to January and make Sun-Cutter a priority in 2013.

In the meantime, I have the Sun-Cutter archive on my website and also on Tumblr now.

Crossposts: http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/199273.html

Entry tags:

webcomics,
website

State of the website to-do list

Did some tweaks to the HM archive (the chapter drop-down no longer opens in a new tab, among other things).

~~Portal page for the Kismet graphic novels.~~ Done! Turned out I had one already, so I just had to tweak it a bit.

~~Locally hosted Sun-Cutter archive.~~ Er ... getting there. I've done all I can do (basic layout, logo, landing page) before figuring out whether I want to use static, hard-coded pages, as with Hunter's Moon, or some sort of dynamic page setup.

It wasn't a hard decision to go for static pages with HM, because it's completed, so hard-coded pages and a table of contents make perfect sense. With SC, though, I'm going to be adding pages regularly, so I'll need to be rotating pages on a weekly basis from some sort of "new page" location into the archive.

( More noodling under the cut )

Crossposts: http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/199067.html

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"Hunter's Moon" is up on my website!

... in all its 340-page glory. \o/

http://www.kismetcity.com/huntersmoon/hmchapterindex.shtml

It's not linked from the main page yet; I'm still figuring out what that end of things is going to look like. (I think that I want a single front page for all the Kismet graphic novels, which then links to each novel's individual page. So I still need to build that.) And I might add another layer of menus at the bottom of each comic page with links to the main page and whatnot. But basically, this was today's project and I GOT IT DONE. I think this calls for a glass of wine. *pours*

Things I have learned today:

Internet Explorer is DEMONSPAWN. (Well, okay, I already knew that, but I got to the point where I was so baffled at how to get some of my div tags to be compatible with IE that I just broke down and used tables. Shhh, don't tell anyone.)
Linux shell scripting, on the other hand, is awesome. Once I got my page template and CSS in nice working order, the entire 340-page archive was generated using a single while loop (in batches, so that I could swap out different SSI menus).
The Mac has tools to do a batch filename find-replace! How did I never know this before?

I've wanted to get the HM archive on my own domain for a long time, and now it's there -- ad-free, bare-bones, safe and permanent as long as I pay my web hosting bill. I don't know how to do a lot of fancy pro-quality things with HTML, and my general website design aesthetic is still stuck in 2002 -- but I can do basic functional web design and I'm pretty happy with it.

The rest of my July website To Do list, not necessarily in order:

Portal page for the Kismet graphic novels.
Locally hosted Sun-Cutter archive (probably based on the HM page template, except with a white background).
Finish getting Sun-Cutter up on Tumblr.
Downloadable versions of Hunter's Moon (PDF and HTML).
Some sort of gallery.

Crossposts: http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/197823.html

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Things which are in progress

So here's what I've been doing today:

1. I made a Wordpress! Eventually this will be the central hub of my website. At the moment it's getting broken a lot as I play with styles and figure out where I want all the content to go.

2. I made a Tumblr! And I gotta say - as much as I always hated Tumblr as a casual browser of the site, I absolutely love its interface as a user. SO. EASY! Thus far, I am finding it incredibly fun to play with and generally quite intuitive/easy to figure out how to do things. I also think that posting a webcomic on Tumblr might work better than I had thought. This will be sort of a general art blog for me -- I'll be posting webcomic pages, random art, fanart, etc. (At least that's the idea.)

At this point, both of these things are highly experimental works in progress. However, after many years of doing all my website content management using hand-coded text files, I think I might be in the process of switching over to all-web-based content management. There are so many more and better tools for it than there were ten years ago. When I started poking around my website's back end today, I was expecting to end up feeling old and frustrated and out of the loop, but instead, the more I explore, the more fun I'm having. So many options! So many shiny content tools! I want to install them ALL. (Galleries! Video! Php goodies! Whee!)

Comments are welcome! If you see anything stupid and n00bish that I'm doing on either one of these, please tell me? In the meantime, I think I shall go back to playing with my shiny toys now. :D