Awhile back, I accidentally managed to totally blow up the ability to leave comments on the site after an entry's been up for a few days. I'm in the process of fixing this the easy way - by creating a new blog, the same as the old blog. Rather than import all of the old entries, I'm currently in the process of crosswiring everything so it Works and Looks The Same.

When I'm done, the site should look exactly as it did a few minutes ago. In theory.

19:05 : And in practice. Though my nice clean blog is now a horrific mess, and will continue to be one until I generate enough entries to scrub the busted blog entries off of the front page. The change in functionality won't be immediately obvious, and there's still a lot more cleanup work to do in order to effectively scrub out the chance of any future "errors" (read : trying to post a comment on old entries), but all things considered this is one web bug that's gone down easily.

So. Comments will work indefinitely on all new entries. A bit more maintenance for me, but hopefully it'll turn out to be worth it. Fusing old/new noise blogs together was a heck of a lot easier than gluing Chapters 0 and 1 of The Dualist together.

.... and am in all likelihood going to remain a dumbass, I've created a new category to dump my dumbassery into : Ignorance.

At present this contains a bunch of malformed tech rants that were either shot down or just read like ignorant bitching. I may (but probably won't) go through the other categories and dump bits in as I see fit.

- New header graphic. First aesthetic change to the site since launch.

- Recently changed front/noise/pittsburgh from last 30 days to last 60. To obfuscate the slowdown in posting, this has been changed from the last 60 days to the last 30 entries. Which currently covers two years of the Pittsburgh section.

- Comment garbage cleaned out of DCR comic archives.

- Blogroll/links are next on the to-do list.

The yay thing about a new calendar year? Updating the © on the loc, dcr, gridlock, ATC, gravicon, and ppac websites.

This is done in a completely different way on each site - flat files in some cases, varying types of CMS templates in others. A very deeply nested PHP include in one case. Fortunately, having dealt with this thing before and realizing I'd be dealing with it again (and again, and again), the CMS-managed sites all have their footer includes (the bit with the ©) clearly labeled.

The month is less than eight hours old and a bit that usually nags me well into the spring is all done and taken care of. Hopefully the rest of 2k8's to-do list passes in similar fashion.

New category. A few entries from static have been recategorized into it. I've also retconned in all of the non-ATC, non-pinup bits I've produced since DCR went online.

{Thank|Blame} xeno.

Seriously. Mucking around with mt-close and the (vastly superior) mt-close2 and somehow mt-close diddled the db (and mt-close2 either does the same thing or failed to fix it) and now an entry with comments closed by the script can't have commenting reopened. Turn comments back to Open in the entry field, save, and when the cgi spits back the editing window comments are reset to close... but the comment markup is written out.... and fails to execute.

Or whatever the proper webmastering verbage is.

Silly shit, that. I should probably upgrade.

The primary blog - which I haven't been doing much with on account of being busy - has been more or less cleaned up re: comments. I'll fix the rest of it later - probably when I start gearing back up for DCR (comic) production.

ATC & DCR have moved from bda's care to ejp's. Both sites went static about a week before christmas - since Eric and I both had better things to do, they've stayed that way until recently.

Check one, check two. Etc.

Of course, work's DNS is a total asshole and continues - hours after it resolves properly everywhere else - to insist that ATC is still at the old location.

Update, 20070107.07:34 - pinging ATC from work now results in total packet loss. The system is still trying to connect to the old address for some fucking reason.

Makes you wonder - if I was caught up on ATC and had a DCR backlog to polish up and post (I do, but it's blog-related, and I'm counting comics here), would ATC be working instead? :P

Mercury had a Viz section - one that's horribly outdated. There were some desktops and stuff on the Secret About Box, which has gone blooey. It was always the plan to eventually jam all of that stuff in here. Now that The Big Huge Work Project is over with, and we're in the pre-Next Big Huge Work Project lull, I might actually get around to it.

Of course, I might also cut more PPAC tracks, get back to DCR, etc.

You know how it goes.

Those of you who sniff markup will notice that a vast amount of the redundant <div align="left"></div> has disappeared from root, pittsburgh and noise. That hunk of markup had been there since launch but the idea is that this is a year for getting shit done, so.

Spiffy, isn't it?

Remembering I still need to lay in "viz" (wallpaper dump for those who use it, not me [running 10/4 'Aqua Graphite' all machines], DCR sketchwork etc.), 'solios' (seriously) and some other stuff, still curious as to how page/archive navigation for DCR comic is going to shape up - will need to be at least partway into the 'break' (tentative) micro-arc before there's enough material to get serious.

Anyone who's followed ATC since incept remembers just how many interface iterations that went through. DCR (site) is effectively mercury (blog) information design with comic inserted. If it ain't broke etc.

Still reading jerkcity archives (obvious, amused).

Stream of conscious (so easy) aside, DCR information design isn't perfect, will need at least two more storylines to de-kink, etceteras, and said warts won't be effecting launch time, regardless of useability issues.

Removal of index.html slated for first or second strip of Finals or last day of September, whichever comes first. Still need to write 'finals' but unlike ATC it doesn't need to be fully functional beyond a basic working outline, of which I already have several key components.

For the moment, comments have been enabled for noise. We'll see how long this functionality sticks around - a comment-enabled ATC lasted about ten minutes.

Older and wiser, etc.

Since the general intent of the site is to scream "THIS IS PITTSBURGH!" and "I LIKE INDUSTRIAL SO I'M DOING AN INDUSTRIAL COMIC SINCE NOBODY ELSE IS DAMMIT!!!!" as loud as possible, I'm assuming that comments will eventually fit into this somehow.

Check one, check two. Check check, sound check.

The Pittsburgh section is technically online - it uses the same templates as noise and will be updated much less frequently.

The intent is to do "articles" and photo dumps - the articles are still in a hazy state of indecision and the photo dump element will need some more work before it's viable. But hey, it's a Start and it's Part Of The DCR Project, and a nice test of front page integration.

The second of seven panels for the next ATC page is still rendering. In the meantime, I've done some tweaks and general setup to the comic section of DCR ("signal"), as well as some other under-the-hood what-have-you.

I'm at the point with DCR where I have to make the same decisions I'd have to make about any ATC scene, and it's going to take comics - lots of comics - to work out all of the kinks in the information design. Such as it is.

So that's that. In the meantime, DCR is about as good as it gets - until it's time to crunch viz or unload the Pittsburgh section. Thinking I should have the entire first scene of the comic done before I nuke the index.html and "officially" launch the comic and site. Which might take a week or three.

The main reason for that? They're big, and I still need to tweak the "extended entry" stuff. Better to thunk in some old, halfway-useable information than to sit here and fap-fap-fap until something long enough plops out.

So to speak.

Comic navigation is looking pretty ugly at the moment, and will probably continue to do so through Labor Day weekend - don't know when I'm going to throw the "go" switch just yet, but the "noise" blog replaced mercury the second the RSS feed tested clean, so.

Viz, etc. will likely be kludged into some sort of fixed-up goodness as needed - meaning Generic Bullshit goes first and the pittsburgh-centric stuff goes second, as I'm still kind of vague on how exactly I want to execute that end of things.

Ramble, ramble, started thinking along these lines last year, ramble ramble repeat, drone, fail to say anything else meaningful, attempt to close and wind up with a Stephenson ending.

Right, then. Noise certainly has enough seed material. Still have to do extended entry markup and possibly comment logic - though going that route isn't currently part of the plan, it may prove useful. Better to need and not have, etc.

And I'm getting templates for the "program" more or less finalized. The root for the comic isn't what I want - nowhere near what I want, actually - I'm going to have to do custom art for that, and it's going to be pretty spiffy. Looking forward to that, actually - mostly because it'll one of the many little things that separates DCR-the-comic from ATC-the-comic.

Aim to make the navigation as presently defined ( transmission, program, noise ) actually functional before I split - FAQ gets to be a # until I get a few more questions to plug into it.

2107 : I'm about as far as I can go with the comic at the moment without sitting down and doing some more of it - which I need to do soon, if for no other reason than debugging the strip navigation.

That aside, I think all of the necessary skeletal bits are in place : strip templating is sorted for the moment, and the "noise" templating can be tweaked to do the Pittsburgh thing.

Slammed a Starbucks double espresso canned energy drink thing (hence "Ass Grenade"), still waiting for it to kick and the front page is wired up. I'm fairly certain it's How I Want It, but I'll need to actually make more strips and upload them in order to be sure.

As it stands, the front page is linked to an external template from all blogs that are currently in use, using mtglobal tags to keep everything swank. So far the presentation is adhering to spec, though I've had to tweak the CSS and am definitley going to be having issues with viz.

The web backend always seems to be the shittiest part of any project I work on. :P

There's enough noise going on to get the major kinks worked out, though I still have to populate noise-viz and get the welding sorted out.

That or rework my information design, one or the other. All of which will likely happen whenever I post a non-strip image. In the meantime, major debugging is complete, and this thing (for a change) looks decent in IE 6.

(insert flaccid fappage w/r/t overall information design, lack thereof, etc.)

... and I need another post to another category for debug purposes. So far the idea of using icons for section categories seems to be working nicely, though I'm sure it's going to get frustrating when I run out of images I've stocked up and need to create new graphics, etc.

11:30 < solios> dcr is wired for rss.
11:31 < ejp> RSS is only useful if the site actually updates. :P

At this point, the rss template I'm using is the canned MtGlobal writeout I cobbled together for ATC. Easier to flip open five blogs and do a little bit of copy/paste for something I know works than it is to, say, start peeling apart the templates and getting things going when I don't even have a fully fleshed out base of material to pull from.

That said, the front page is probably going to make use of the same plugin, so updates to any section are written out in the correct order. It should be noted that MTGlobalListings will do a by-date writeout from all of the blogs, which is what I'm looking for - MTOtherBlog grabs and lists from each blog in order - useful for some things, but not what I'm aiming for here.

Or rather, MTGL works with RSS. How well it'll work under other conditions is something I'm about to find out.