Keenspace.com Giving Season wishlist 2004

[Phalanx]

The template suggestion is not as hard as it sounds, really. If we each pitched in, we could come up with a nice range of premade indextemplates... They don't have to be fancy... just better looking than the default Bone white one.

The templates are definitely in great demand though. The two templates I've made for the workshop so far, Charcoal and Ocean Blue, are spreading faster than termites in rotten wood.

A mechanism in the siteadmin that automatically uploads the selected templates would be nice... but optional.

[Kisai]

The template suggestion is not as hard as it sounds, really. If we each pitched in, we could come up with a nice range of premade indextemplates... They don't have to be fancy... just better looking than the default Bone white one.

The templates are definitely in great demand though. The two templates I've made for the workshop so far, Charcoal and Ocean Blue, are spreading faster than termites in rotten wood.

A mechanism in the siteadmin that automatically uploads the selected templates would be nice... but optional.

What we need are template "packages" , html, css and images required for a stock template. maybe in a zip file that can just be unzipped with all the files going to the right place.

[War]

If we all created templates linking to a css of the same name, would it be possible to put a nice easy colour selector onto the members page? Then newbies could choose a template they want, and they play around with the colours in the members page so they wouldn't have to play with any html at all.

[STrRedWolf]

I'm checking the code now, and see:

***todays_caption***
This lets you do a one-liner title of each comic. To impliment this, in your /workspace/data directory create a file named "captions.txt". Each line in this file will be treated as one entry in this format:

Filenameofyourcomic Caption of the comic.

For example:
20041112-Ender2004-09.png Take two of these and call me in the morning.

Bad things to do in this file:
HTML FORMATTING (just don't do it)
WORD WRAPPING (it screws things up, m'kay? Use Notepad and unselect Word Wrapping)
SPACES IN THE FILENAMES (That just screws everything up. This is Unix, not Windows!)

Have fun with it, and if there's any problems, let me know, and I'll try to fix it. This isn't the best code, I'll tell you.

On ***rants***, what if we try to impliment subcomics (like ***todays_subcomic***

[Kisai]

I'm checking the code now, and see:

***todays_caption***
This lets you do a one-liner title of each comic. To impliment this, in your /workspace/data directory create a file named "captions.txt". Each line in this file will be treated as one entry in this format:

Filenameofyourcomic Caption of the comic.

For example:
20041112-Ender2004-09.png Take two of these and call me in the morning.

Bad things to do in this file:
HTML FORMATTING (just don't do it)
WORD WRAPPING (it screws things up, m'kay? Use Notepad and unselect Word Wrapping)
SPACES IN THE FILENAMES (That just screws everything up. This is Unix, not Windows!)

Have fun with it, and if there's any problems, let me know, and I'll try to fix it. This isn't the best code, I'll tell you.

On ***rants***, what if we try to impliment subcomics (like ***todays_subcomic***

I don't want to duplicate anything that we already have in the forums...

...
hehe

I think I might have found a solution to this. I'm going to DELETE the authors entirely and have it use the forums users. That way a rant "post" can be done by creating a new thread of the same date or some junk like that.

[Joel Fagin]

what if we try to impliment subcomics (like ***todays_subcomic***

That would provide a whole heap of extra versatility but... Everyone does rants, if only for occassional announcments, and I think it's important that it's a nice straightforward ***rant*** tag.

Is there any easy way to make psuedonyms for tags? So, for example, you could have a ***rant*** tag but it's just another name for ***todays_subcomic*** and does exactly the same thing. Kinda like a #define in C programming. That would make for the best of both worlds.

- Joel Fagin

[CodeGuy]

todays_subcomic? So basically any day could have 2 comics in seperate places on the page? But you can put anything in either of them, like you can put anything in todays_comic already?

Wow. That's more powerful than what I was requesting. Woohoo!

Thanks for looking into this stuff, guys.

[CodeGuy]

The more I think about the subcomic idea, the more I think it's perfect. I just realized that added extra rants like http://penny-arcade.com is easy. You don't even have to edit the old file, you just throw a sub20041113b.txt into the comics directory. Then it would stack right under the first one.

[STrRedWolf]

That's what I'm saying. A generalized subcomic interface will do the trick nicely, and for some folk (wireless PDA users, for instance) it could be intresting to make a shrunken comic for them (I had mine at stalag99mini.keenspace.com, but I think it went bye bye and I won't update it).

We will have to also impliment ***prev/next/first/last_subcomic*** so if folks like this idea...

[CodeGuy]

You would? I thought the idea was that the subcomic was tied into the same day as the regular comic. Wouldn't everything be on the same page, thus needing only one set of prev/next/first/last tags?

[Joel Fagin]

You would? I thought the idea was that the subcomic was tied into the same day as the regular comic. Wouldn't everything be on the same page, thus needing only one set of prev/next/first/last tags?

I can see advantages either way but we're mainly talking about archived rants here, so your way would be best, Codeguy.

A thought, though. I said earlier that it would be more straightforward for the non-web savvy newbie to simply have a ***rant*** tag. Right now, we have a tag for a seperate comic that will also happens to support a rant.

Why not reverse that? Why not have a rant tag which happens to support a second comic? Either way, we have a tag that's capable of inserting additional content of any sort but more people would have use for it as a rant tag than a second comic tag. Let the minority be the ones who need to be creative with the tag.

BTW, this gets my second vote. Chapter buttons are still first, of course.

- Joel Fagin

[Rhellik]

Why not have a rant tag which happens to support a second comic? Either way, we have a tag that's capable of inserting additional content of any sort but more people would have use for it as a rant tag than a second comic tag.

Yes, sounds about like what everybody would want.
GO RANT! / SUBCOMIC!

[Ferguson]

The recent loading problems with tagboard.com makes me renew my support for a keenspace tagboard script or tag.

[Moghendhim]

Yeah, in light of the persistent nonsense with tag-board going down for a week at a time, every few months, my vote goes to having some similar object locally.

[Joel Fagin]

I suppose now that we have a list of ideas, we need a proper voting thread.

- Joel Fagin

[Dragonmun]

I actually have two things that I would like to be able to do with my comic, one of which has litteraly been driving me nuts, and another which I think would be neat.

1.) The one that's been driving me nuts:

Sometimes I accidently put the wrong date on my comic, and I don't realize it until after it's supposed to have updated the comic. Well. I go back and fix the date, re-upload it, and find that I have two instances (for obvious reasons) of the same comic.

I would Just like a feature that would let me go back and delete the mis-dated comic from the admin section (since FTP access doesn't always let me do it.)



2.) The other feature that I would like to see:

A simplified storyarch script.

I know that there's a way to seperate storyarchs in javascript out there, but that seriously seems like it's something that's a tad over-complicated. I would like to be able to specify comics into story archs from the admin section.

I don't think that it would take to much from a programers persepective since all you would really have to do is make a new database table that just stated what comic (from the calendar table) connects to what storyarch.

*Shrugs*

That's my two sense ;p

[CodeGuy]

I would Just like a feature that would let me go back and delete the mis-dated comic from the admin section (since FTP access doesn't always let me do it.)

I believe this will happen just by doing a full update.

[Dysdaera]

I think this would be something really easy to implement, and I hope, therefore, that it'll be taken into consideration. It is:

A two-digit numerical display option in autokeen for the month. We have ***the_year*** which will display 2004; we have ***day_of_the_month*** which will display 20; what we don't have is a month displayable in numbers (01-12, for example). It may be seen as a bit much to have three different ways to display the month (we have ***month_of_the_year*** and ***short_month***, if I recall correctly) but it'll help people who are using a different method to archive their rants, but who also want to keep them with the comic they're ranting for (more often than not, this external service is LiveJournal). It'll also let people who want to display the date of their comic in a slash/period-style format (11.13.04 or 11/13/04) do so (as raw_date really doesn't serve for that purpose). Hey, maybe it even already exists, and I just don't know about it =D It's possible. I only just recently learned about the include business, both with Autokeen and the PHP version =D;;

When I was going to do this (going back to the Keenspace/LJ dual-wielding here, btw) myself, my first thought was to use ***raw_date*** in an iFrame SRC (example: hb_comic/#***raw_date***, which would become the specific date for each page it's on, ie 20041113 on /d/20041113.html, 20010119 on d/d20010119.html, etc.), and add said anchor to the beginning of each subject line in LJ, but iFrames and anchors don't seem to get along on load.

After thinking about it, the ideal solution would be to have the iFrame go to hb_comic/***the_year***/***numerical_month***/***day_of_the_month*** which would load up this page, thus avoiding any need for anchors, which would break once the maximum number of comics/commentaries were posted and they moved to /?skip=25

[McDuffies]

I actually have two things that I would like to be able to do with my comic, one of which has litteraly been driving me nuts, and another which I think would be neat.

1.) The one that's been driving me nuts:

Sometimes I accidently put the wrong date on my comic, and I don't realize it until after it's supposed to have updated the comic. Well. I go back and fix the date, re-upload it, and find that I have two instances (for obvious reasons) of the same comic.

Hehe, one thing came to my mind, although it has nothing with current topic. A program that authomatically names comics based on desired schedule... Of course, it's not something that should be implemented in space's system, but it's bugging so many people that I thought it would be handy if we had such thing to download from gear or something.

[Godoftarot]

I haven't read every last reply, but I noticed someone mentioned things like voting and reviews...in that case, though, the owner of the comic should have the option to take a review down if it's offense or mean. Let's face it, there are people who would much rather take pleasure in being cruel than looking for any redeeming factors in a comic. And it could easily be used as a way for some ass to take a personal thing out on the webcomic author, too.

Isn't it so unfortunate that there are people like that in the world?