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China comics website
Dec. 22nd, 2009 03:26 pmThose of you who follow ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sushusketches have seen the new china comics updates. Yeah, it's been a while. 4 months, in fact. ^^;;;; 1 month spent dawdling and deciding that I'm leaving LJ and using wordpress + comicpress. (Major reason: obnoxious ads for non-LJ users. Major regret: friendly comment threading and notification). 2 months spent busy with school and also many false starts -- I wanted to draw something about the street life in China, but had difficulty not repeating myself. Then I wanted to draw something about residential communities, but couldn't think of enough to say without explaining old people. And so it wasn't until I was stuck on a plane to Chicago for Thanksgiving that I said, "Hey! let's put the street and the residential community together!" and got the approach and tone figured out. Then I spent 1 month being busy with school again. :/
I spent some of last night and this morning fiddling with the new website for it, which can be found here: http://www.sushux.net/chinacomic/ . It doesn't look amazing, basically just a quick color swap of the original comicpress default theme so that it matches with the rest of my site. I did spend some time trying to make it functional -- I typed up transcripts, so you can search for random words like "gaudy" or "street" or whatever. I categorized each comic into topics of "lifestyle", "objects", "places", and "attitudes", and also tagged commonly appearing things like food.
I had a hard time with the navigation, and even now it's not satisfactory. The primary system that wordpress supports is date-based -- calendars and monthly archives. Comicpress adds chapter and storyline support. Since my comic doesn't really have a single narrative, the forward/back and chapter archival setup doesn't really work for me.* What I wanted as a way to easily navigate to any comic by name, and a way to browse the comics visually. So on the side bar, there's a "recent comics", but that maxes out at 15, so in a few more comics it will no longer be a complete list. If you click on archive, you can sort of browse through all of the comics. And at the bottom of the comic post, there's a "related comics" -- comics that have the same tag. So hopefully the navigation works out. The next step is designing non-obnoxious navigation buttons so that I can put a set at the top of the comic.
Anyway, I'll still cross-post tosushusketches . I'm wondering if you guys have any preference for commenting on LJ versus commenting on the comic. It's not much effort for me to manually mirror any LJ comments onto the website, and then you can get LJ threaded comments and notifications and stuff just like normal... But you should still link to the website itself. yea/nay?
Moving forward, I'm quite happy about finally finishing the streets/residential communities comic. I've been struggling with the streets comic for a long time. (In fact, the Buying Stuff comic was a failed attempt). I think I'm about done with the basics of China (maybe one more about restaurants and one more about bathrooms??), and so a new topic may be "stories" -- the anecdotes that some of you have given me. Yay!
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*This is a problem that I see in perry bible fellowship, kate beaton's comics, penny arcade, etc, and no one really resolves it satisfactorily.
sushusketches have seen the new china comics updates. Yeah, it's been a while. 4 months, in fact. ^^;;;; 1 month spent dawdling and deciding that I'm leaving LJ and using wordpress + comicpress. (Major reason: obnoxious ads for non-LJ users. Major regret: friendly comment threading and notification). 2 months spent busy with school and also many false starts -- I wanted to draw something about the street life in China, but had difficulty not repeating myself. Then I wanted to draw something about residential communities, but couldn't think of enough to say without explaining old people. And so it wasn't until I was stuck on a plane to Chicago for Thanksgiving that I said, "Hey! let's put the street and the residential community together!" and got the approach and tone figured out. Then I spent 1 month being busy with school again. :/ I spent some of last night and this morning fiddling with the new website for it, which can be found here: http://www.sushux.net/chinacomic/ . It doesn't look amazing, basically just a quick color swap of the original comicpress default theme so that it matches with the rest of my site. I did spend some time trying to make it functional -- I typed up transcripts, so you can search for random words like "gaudy" or "street" or whatever. I categorized each comic into topics of "lifestyle", "objects", "places", and "attitudes", and also tagged commonly appearing things like food.
I had a hard time with the navigation, and even now it's not satisfactory. The primary system that wordpress supports is date-based -- calendars and monthly archives. Comicpress adds chapter and storyline support. Since my comic doesn't really have a single narrative, the forward/back and chapter archival setup doesn't really work for me.* What I wanted as a way to easily navigate to any comic by name, and a way to browse the comics visually. So on the side bar, there's a "recent comics", but that maxes out at 15, so in a few more comics it will no longer be a complete list. If you click on archive, you can sort of browse through all of the comics. And at the bottom of the comic post, there's a "related comics" -- comics that have the same tag. So hopefully the navigation works out. The next step is designing non-obnoxious navigation buttons so that I can put a set at the top of the comic.
Anyway, I'll still cross-post to
sushusketches . I'm wondering if you guys have any preference for commenting on LJ versus commenting on the comic. It's not much effort for me to manually mirror any LJ comments onto the website, and then you can get LJ threaded comments and notifications and stuff just like normal... But you should still link to the website itself. yea/nay? Moving forward, I'm quite happy about finally finishing the streets/residential communities comic. I've been struggling with the streets comic for a long time. (In fact, the Buying Stuff comic was a failed attempt). I think I'm about done with the basics of China (maybe one more about restaurants and one more about bathrooms??), and so a new topic may be "stories" -- the anecdotes that some of you have given me. Yay!
--------------------
*This is a problem that I see in perry bible fellowship, kate beaton's comics, penny arcade, etc, and no one really resolves it satisfactorily.
