*clicks New Post, gets overwhelmed with extremely-fancy post-creator thinger* oh jeez it is new
Anyway, hello! Welcome to New Site! If the DNS has caught up with you. If it hasn’t, then you’re not reading this!
Let’s start out by saying I Hate New Things. If I could, I would’ve continued running the old site until I was a billion years old, held together by tape (both me and the site), finally beginning to write the characters’ sophomore year. But the old site was built on ComicPress, which is a WordPress plugin that doesn’t exist anymore. And the more it doesn’t exist, the more shit starts falling apart! AND IT WAS STILL WORKING, TECHNICALLY! Which I would bring up every time Kevin and Chuck would say, uh, hey, you need a new site built on something that currently exists and is supported. And I’d point out my right bottom wisdom tooth, which my dentist has been advising me remove for like five years now because it’s crumbling, it’s really just a clump of shards, BUT IT DOESN’T HURT YET, so until then I’m keeping it. (The dentist has given up asking me to remove it.)
But, like, fine. Make a new site. Do it. But make it as much like the old site as possible, because, again, I Hate New Things. And by god, they did their best to appease my mad whims. Sure, some stuff needs to be sorted, still. They and me are working on that when we find things to trim. So it looks kinda mostly like the old site! And, most importantly, it’s not built on increasingly soggy and moldy cardboard. This cardboard is FRESH, yo.
back end’s kinda nuts, though
hate new things
btw now that comicpress is gone the site can finally update to WordPress v6.9 which is, say it:
57 thoughts on “Site is new!”
Victor Mortimer
*sigh*
Yeah, guess you had to. It’s not awful. Maybe make the font on the comments a bit smaller? It just seems too big.
Edit: Being able to edit comments is great! Everybody typos sometimes.
Trut
NICE
Big Z
Is there a process for bug reporting as you’re troubleshooting the new site software? Or a place we should confine bug reports to?
r
nice
Circeus
Love that the post cut off there at the end. Very apposite.
Kayesitron
I think the intent was for everyone to say “Nice.” in the comments.
Misel
Each comic is now integrated into the RSS posts.
That’s how I noticed the new site. I finished the strip and was wondering where the comments are, only to realize that I’m still in my feed reader.
This is nice, but I’m not sure it’s something you want. It would mean less traffic to the website.
The Esquire
nice
Bo Lindbergh
You might have to replace the Mar 30, 2012 installment. WordPress seems to think that an URL ending with “/tag/” means to search for an empty tag name.
David M Willis
I’ve renamed the strip/page and it seems to work now! Thanks!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/comic/tag-along/
Amós Batista
But isn’t Hive Works that must maintaining this site for you? So you’re able to maintain or change everything in this site, right?
Amós Batista
Anyway: I loved the new site. I don’t like it get even more slow.
AntithesisConundrum
btw now that comicpress is gone the site can finally update to WordPress v6.9 which is, say it:
Posted in Blog
Jennifer Bak
I noticed the buttons were different. Oh! And the font is a different size now in this comment box, too. Huh, will take some getting used to. Huh, and I had to retype in my name. I wonder if my avatar will still be there or will it be gone?
What I really appreciate is that you addressed the fact that it changed and let us know, instead of just changing it and going on as if nothing happened. You addressing this directly makes my neurospicy brain happier and more able to not be bugged by the change. Thank you.
Jennifer Bak
Yay! My avatar is still there!
Marvelman
I was under the impression that the strip would end when the characters finished their freshman year. Was I wrong?
El Bee
I believe Willis has said he doesn’t expect to get out of freshman year, just in terms of the comic’s pacing. So nothing so definite – and I could fully understand a decision to, eg, skip to sophomore year for narrative purposes.
But absent that, as the strip’s been running 15+ years and only covered 6 months of story (and that with a 3-month timeskip), it’s not a stretch to think it could run for 30 years or more and still not get to the end of the academic year…
Benjamin
Not sure why you think you’re wrong given that in this post he joked about starting to write the sophomore year aren’t age of *a billion years old*. The implication of that at the moment at least is yes, the comic will continue to be written for the indefinite future in the freshman year. Unless you are concerned about the year one billion two thousand and twenty-six, you’re fine on your assumptions 🙂
AntithesisConundrum
Happy for the fact that this site is no longer built on moldy sand — that is inarguably a good thing — but have a lingering question. Will the new-site be getting faster?
I’ve noticed that it now takes me ~10 seconds to load each strip, which is really impeding my ability to reread smoothly. (It’s probably doing wonders for my work productivity, TBH.)
Is this a known issue / something that there are plans to address?
Sabrina Pandora
So, as someone still using WordPress for my site, what did you switch off to?
David M Willis
Still on WordPress, but I’m no longer on the ComicPress plugin for WordPress. I’m on Toocheke now!
SaffronComic
How does it compare to ComicPress? I have a ComicPress comic that’s between books r/n and I should probably upgrade it soon myself. Anything cool/concerning about Toocheke in your first impressions?
David M Willis
well about 80% of the menu options on the back end are about manga series/volumes/chapters stuff i’ll never touch
Sabrina Pandora
Whew! Okay, I also use Toocheke as well, and while I will be the first to admit I don’t know how to set it up, once set up it has been super easy to work with. I paid a local pal to teach me the ins and outs and it was worth the time.
Archives can be a bit weird, but again, likely my misunderstanding how to use the program than a defect in the software.
Mitzi B.
losing the arbitrarily assigned gravatars is a bummer, and the ‘save my name/email/website’ checkmark doesn’t work (for one thing, I don’t get the option to enter a website) yet, but I’m willing to wait for everything to get updated
Needfuldoer
RIP Grav Roulette o7
Dare
Nice look!
Missing feature: you can no longer search with multiple tags?
David M Willis
THINGS NOTED AND FIXED:
– comment section threads were nesting too many times, resulting in hilariously narrow comments, so reduced nestinging from 8 to 4
– reactivated the “click the comic and get the next comic” functionality
THINGS NOTED AND NOT FIXED YET:
– The “tapping the empty navigation corners to get the hovertext” may have been a ComicPress-specific functionality! Currently you can get the hovertext by tapping and holding on the comic.
will look into possibility of reimplementing
– the “searching multiple tags by putting +s between them” missingness has been noted, will be looked into
– Comic corners being cropped off on some mobile screens has been noted, will be looked into
– comic text too large? might need more specifics, but will be looked into
David M Willis
– Padding has been added to the edges of the mobile screen version, hopefully solving that issue
Adam Black
Willis, only 1 thing is broken for me ( the only reason I knew site was changed) .
But its super annoying. I’m on mobile ( Samsung Android, Chrome browser) and the user agent seems broken
It’s stuck displaying Full screen mobile vertical
( which can’t be resized or moved. ) the side panels are missing and all their content displays vertically at the bottom.
Comic panels are stuck in little mode. And comments can become vertical lined of text
. Toggling to Desktop does nothing
IntangibleMatter
Nice
apocryphascribe
*sigh* Nice.
P!enapple
I hate new things too. Is that what we were supposed to say? Lolol if so, i whole heartedly agree!!
It looks about the same to me, except the direction buttons are huge, which is fine, just startled. Ty so much for explaining, as was said above. I was wondering if it were me or my phone, cuz I’ve been having tech issues also.
Ik it’s frustrating, and i hope it works out quickly and easily soon!
shork
it’s nice to have a mobile mode! no more zooming in to read comments
that being said, I noticed the old way of reading alt text on mobile doesn’t work anymore, and all but the most recent comic don’t have alt text on the image all, I hope it’s not lost? that’d be a shame
David M Willis
I assure you all of the alt-texts are at least stored on the back end, so they’re not gone. I’ll add not being able to see them sometimes into the list of things to look into.
David M Willis
I’ve disabled the “click on the comic to browse to the next comic page” navigation option to see if this re-enables the hovertext for the archive pages. Based on a suspicion.
P!enapple
Idk if it’s my phone, me, or the change, but I can’t click on the comic itself or around the navigation buttons to see the alt-text. I have a Samsung phone, cheaper model. It’s an fyi about the topic, not yelling 😁
Good luck, especially with all else going on!
EpochFlame
on iphone holding the image shows the alt text
C Baker
Please have your wisdom tooth pulled. The longer you wait, the worse the process is going to be, especially if it’s crumbling. An abcess can kill you, or at the very least, cause you to lose a substantial portion of your jaw and other teeth.
P!enapple
Idk if it’s my phone, me, or the change, but I can’t click on the comic itself or around the navigation buttons to see the alt-text. I have a Samsung phone, cheaper model. It’s an fyi about the topic, not yelling 😁
Good luck, especially with all else going on!
cain
It only works on some browsers, but try a click-and-hold on the comic image itself. In Firefox this lets me see the alt text (or the file name, if no alt text exists)
Kyulen
I’m getting used to the new site, though it’s kinda weird not seeing the various character avatars for people who don’t have a custom avatar. Hope it doesn’t take long to fix all the stuff that’s broke right now.
cain
Site’s looking good! Comments are hard to read on mobile when they nest more than twice, though (because it becomes a single word per line). Not sure how best to handle that… smaller indents maybe?
You’re all doing what you can and I’m glad the site is on a more supported framework now.
Notebooked
Probably a good thing overall, but full solidarity in hating change.
The main thing I noticed is that on mobile the navigation buttons are pretty huge compared to the strip, like half the size of the strip and taking up two rows, but that should be pretty manageable to resize. Noticed it when doing my daily Two Minutes Out Of Sleep, Read DoA
Bronze
Its nice! The only problem I have is a nitpick, which is i can no longer click on the actual comic strip to go to the next one and I have to hit the next button. But I haven’t had any other sort of problem with it
David M Willis
I had that functionality back for a bit, but it seems to keep the reading-alt-text-on-mobile functionality from working, so I took it off again.
Lokijack
Nice!
Ty34er
Not to be a fake dentist, but you should probably get that tooth out. Honestly I’d be more worried that you CAN’T feel the pain.
Big Steve
Gah! I was just working on bringing back an old site of mine built on Comicpress. I knew it wasn’t supported any more, but I couldn’t find a satisfactory replacement, especially anything that might support all the years of archived supporting stuff and links I had in the archive. But I poked under the hood here to see what you were doing, and I thought “Hey, apparently Willis is still using Comicpress, so I guess there must be some way I can keep it running! Surely THEY know what they’re doing!” That was about two weeks ago, and now I shall just start bashing my head into pulp against my keyboard…
Adam Black
One More Thing,
I haven’t see you comment on the Hiveworks Creator Guild
(Controveries, ending publishing, broken websites and if this new site is equally
entangled with the old
Hiveworks Ending Publishing? According to Comics creator Guild, stolen creator money, in massively debt, fundraisers done badly harming creator. Hiveworks Guild fleeing memberships, Broken website.
I’m not the type who feels you are Morally obligated to address every public morality crises)
I’ve read they are ending publishing. I have a number of Beloved comics forced to rebuild entire sites this year, because WordPress is broken/ hiveworks didn’t do a rebuild after years of asking and now they need their full site working regardless of if Hiveworks crashes and burns.
So I hope new site is built to be platform independent, not om proprietary workmanship and will fully leave if the publisher crashes and burns/ won’t require a 10 month rebuild.
Anna
Hey, is the patreon promo over on the right-hand side meant to be a link? It currently seems to just be a non-clickable image.
El Bee
Glad you’ve been able to migrate the site, and it’s 99% working!
One issue, after browsing the site for a bit: there’s no indication of which book or chapter any given comic is in when you’re reading it. So that makes navigating a bit harder than before.
Not critical at all, but it’s definitely something I miss from the old site.
El Bee
Also, the comic isn’t showing for “Bongo” (March 1st, 2013, Book 3, Guess Who’s Coming to Galasso’s).
Martin Smith
I’m totally with you on the “old thing works mostly fine, I don’t need to replace it”. After putting it off for ages, I’ve just upgraded my main desktop PC with a new mobo, CPU, SSD etc and also upgraded from Win 7 to 10. And after three installations of Windows and a lot of registry edits, it’s mostly all working as it did before. Except my ancient (yet functional!) DVD-RW drive can’t connect to the motherboard. And Cool Edit Pro won’t rip audio from videos any more and I can’t remember what I did to get it to do that way back when. And I can’t get Windows to stop telling me, the administrator, that I need administrator permission to do trivial things.
But yay new things, I guess.
Bo Lindbergh
The bongo filter seems to be still active and screwing up the image URLs for the installments of March 1, 2013 and June 13, 2013.
anon
congrats! hope it workswell
Good luck with ur wisdom tooth
Mo
noice!
yeah, i’m late, so
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