Do you ever have that happen? You go to repair a small thing to make a process a bit simpler, and then, as you’re looking at it, you realize all the things that one small change is going to effect? Then you start making a list of many small changes you need to make. Then you start thinking about all of those ways you wish you would have done things differently when you first designed the bloody contraption. Some of that was really bone-headed dunderbrain thinking and it’s sure taking an awful lot of effort to keep everything running. Next thing you know, you’re tearing the whole mess down and starting from scratch.
On that note, welcome to the entirely new Prophecy of the Circle website! This is not at all how I expected things to look when I started revising a couple of weeks ago. I should have probably expected that. It’s how things always go. Maybe this time the system that it runs on will stay the same, at least. Any major overhauls I feel called to perform in the future should be a lot easier now that the whole site is running off of Comicpress rather than a combination of WordPress and my own bumbling HTML disasters. Seriously, what was I thinking?
As a quick overview of changes, it’s mostly that I’ll have a hell of a lot less work to do when I upload a comic now, and the site generally looks different. The biggest visual changes are that I’m no longer doing the click-through-a-thumbnail process to get to the comic. I was always iffy about that, because while it was good spoiler protection, more clicks generally means less user-friendliness and that’s no good. Besides, that degree of spoiler protection is getting perhaps a tad paranoid. It was time for it to go and for this place to cater to ease of access instead.
The encyclopedia has indeed had the major redo I was hoping for, glorious gloriousness. I pulled the cast profiles out and into their own page, as you can see at the top there, and the information in both has been streamlined and simplified, not to mention updated (of course; and it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be once I got to looking through it).
There are various other goodies scattered about as well, such as the ability to like this site via Facebook and Google+, or share it through varying and numerous services, and a bookmarking system for those of you who are reading from the beginning and don’t want to lose your spot. At least one more major addition is potentially underway that may be of interest to some of you, but I’ll keep that quiet as a protection against the jinx factor.
Now of course, in all of this new system, there’s the chance for bugs. I’m most concerned about the comments systems and how they work for everyone (so feel free to say hello, and you’ll be helping me out). I wasn’t terribly sorry to let go of the old HTML comments system; it was kind of cumbersome and actually led to an attack on my email inbox that made me a rather disgruntled coot for an hour or two. I lament the loss of the old comments, but hopefully the future holds shiny new ones for me.
Good to be back on track, regardless, and back to the regularly scheduled comic. The next page goes live in a couple of hours (and I’d better get on to making sure that goes as planned, as well). Enjoy, guys!