135. UPDATING THE WEBSITE, October 2006
Monday, March 31st, 2008I had been wanting to update the website for over a year, since Wayne Jones had moved onto other projects, at the completion of Tabloia, back in the summer of 2005. After a few false starts, my brother-in-law and web designer, Micah Brenner, said he would help me get the website set up, and he basically did everything.
I didn’t know the first thing about any of that stuff. But I was able to do a lot of prep-work for this major update. I wrote a ton of text, and sent dozens of emails to Micah, with attachments and detailed instructions of what I was looking for. And I grouped photos and drawings together and emailed them to Micah. And page by page, we began adding a ton of stuff to the website, including this very blog you’re reading right now.
I thought, everyone does blogs. Kids do blogs. So maybe I can get this finished and ready to start posting by myself. Micah helped me with a couple questions I had and directed me to a free blog hosting site, and next thing I knew the blog was set up.
When I began posting this blog, I was anxious to post as much of it, as fast as I could, and try to get caught up to my current self-publishing travails. I’d been writing all the back-log history of my self-publishing for about ten months, as Word documents. So posting it, chronologically, as fast as I could, meant cutting and pasting, proof-reading and making sure I hadn’t skipped anything (which it turns out I did here and there, which means going back and actually altering posted blogs as I go), and trying to make sure my timeline is as accurate as possible. And then it means spending some time with the formatting, because I’m having this weird problem. Every time a quote or apostrophe gets pasted into the blog posting page, I get some weird martian symbols instead. I asked Micah about this, and he sent me some links, and the closest I could find was that perhaps there’s a font I could be using that would prevent this, which I have been unable to find. So instead, I’m going in manually with a “find/replace” for all the quotes, and then all the apostrophes, and then there are a couple other ones, such as “…” and “—”. And since I’ve been sometimes posting seven entries in one go, so all this has been taking a lot of time from my drawing.
As we slowly began getting one page, then another, of the revamped website posted, I was taking a lot of time proof-reading, and making sure everything posted okay. Because this was a lot of back-and-forth work between Micah and I, I eventually thought maybe it would be easier on him, if I could start doing these minor text changes, corrections, or additions, as needed, by myself. So I asked my former helper in business affairs, Wayne Jones, for some tips and pointers, and he was way too kind and helpful in that regard. And then I began making the anal corrections on my own, and not bothering Micah with that.
And part of all this set up involved me looking generally through all the wacky codes. And as I spent more and more time with them, looking them over, I started getting a vague sense of what a few of them might mean.
On some of the more simply lain-out pages, I began trying my hand at making bigger changes, such as adding stores to my list of indie shops. This meant understanding how to post links to their stores’ websites, making paragraphs vs. just skipping to the next line, bolding or titling words, things like that. And then I started trying to size, upload, and post images.
I don’t have any programs for the actual layouts, so I just did my changes by looking at the codes that were already established on each page, comparing it to how the page looked, posted on my website, and then adding the “<li>”s and “<ur>”s and the like, to mimic whatever came before on that same page. And these simplistic alterations usually led to me posting something wrong, and me spending more time trying to figure out what I did wrong, and usually getting it fixed eventually, though not always knowing how I fixed it.
I posted the big list of indie-friendly comics shops in the “friends of Tabloia” link, in large part thanks to my fellow indie-friend, Dan Cooney, who’d been developing this huge mailing list. I posted photos of me with all my comics idols. That page gave me a little trouble, though. When I was done, some but not all the images were centered. After doing all I could but not fixing some of the problems, I finally had to have Micah look it over and tweak a couple things.
But now, I was getting so confident and cocky, I started thinking I could do other stuff as well. And I went to work and spent a few hours, and by the time I was done, I had fucked up a bunch of pages and couldn’t even figure out how to fix any of it, and so poor Micah had to go in, and he found all this other stuff I’d fucked up that I wasn’t even aware of, costing him, I’m sure, plenty of time and frustration, cleaning up all the bullshit I had unnecessarily heaped on him. What a good helper I am, taking care of these small changes, to save him time.
So finally, after I believe about a year, I’m getting close to having all the cool stuff I wanted at my website basically all set up.