Today, I mosied on to campus with a 298 page production book in my hands (lots of jaws dropped). I got my signatures; I am finished with grad school. The purpose of this blog was to document my process for the "project journal" section of the produciton book. That's no longer necessary, so either this blog will go away, or it will accompany BetaBits as a sketch journal of sorts. I guess in the meantime I'll let it sit here awkwardly.

Ok, I'm going to elaborate more on that last entry. First, I'm going to begin by confessing that I was unaware that I had the appropriate project handbook beside my desk all this time. I was under the mistaken impression that there was a new one issued for this semester (I can understand where that train of thought came from, I just wish I had actually checked the manual before last week). As a result, I did not know what my actual deadlines were (having fallen away from my self-imposed ones). The good news is that I realized my faulty assumption more or less in time. The bad news is that there is still a lot for me to cover over the next week.

In terms of implementing my site design, I had gotten caught up in learning CSS that I had forgotten how handy tables can be. When I finally came around to using tables (something about consistently nesting divs so that I could get things to align right and yet still expand if needed did not feel solid to me), I found myself fighting CSS too. I was fighting Dreamweaver the most, when I should have been of working with it and then tweaking the code as needed. Somehow I came to my senses and began to work with Dreamweaver, and implementing tables and CSS together. I had something that felt solid, and I had a stylesheet that I could use with different-looking pages (since the bulk of their layouts were now handled by tables and not absolutely positioned css divs). That helped me feel ready to upload to my host.

Then came the host-purchasing. I spent all of Friday reading over hosting plans and terms of service trying to choose the best one. The plan I had outlined in my proposal was going to be too small to hold both my comic and my portfolio site (since I want to keep them together in one account). Moving up to a bigger plan with that service (A Small Orange) was no longer a good option, either: their own website and those of my friend who'd recommended them to me were running glacially slow. I contacted that friend who told me that the speed issue was substantial enough that he was in the process of moving to a new host. So, then came the day of reading plans until my head spun, and then some more. In the end, I wound up going with Bluehost, which another friend of mine had suggested a while back and which was my original alternate to A Small Orange. At least I know I contemplated this thoroughly.

I installed the management script, Comikaze on my new account, uploaded my files, and things just worked. It was amazing. Naturally, there were a few small tweaks and bumps, but it's up there and I'm pretty much awed by that fact. I inputted the new domain name server information for the betabits.net name earlier today in order to expedite the switch. Then I called a real human being at Yahoo! to make sure I entered the information correctly. Not only had I done that, but he could already see my site at betabits.net (he described it to me and everything--he said it looks nice; i was thrilled). The change has yet to propogate to my corner of the Web, but hopefully it will soon, so I can get people checking it out and filling out my survey. Phew. So much more to do, yet I feel so done already!

The comic's site is up, and it is working. The amount of relief I feel right now is immense. However, I still have a lot more to do, particularly in the production-book area. But wow, I officially for-real have a webcomic. Hurrah!

Well, I would like to rescind the freakout in my last entry, as I just discovered that the seemingly major problem is not so major at all...and, in fact, isn't really a problem, just one of those things that happen when all your pieces aren't in place yet. Phew!

Gyahhh!!!! Ahem. Putting together the website layout is proving way more difficult than I thought. Or, just as I thought I had worked out a set of kinks and (most) everything was going smoothly, I asked a friend with a PC to check it out on his computer. The screenshots from both IE and FFX are scream-worthy. Ok, not the screen-shots themselves, but the fact that my attempts to fix the problems apparently have had NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER. Even more frustrating is the fact that I don't have access to a PC myself. I hate relying on friends sending me screenshots from the west coast to see what's going on, but I currently have no other option. Oy.

I took a nap this afternoon, and dreamed of resizing handles. I completely revamped my website design to something I like much better than the original. It turns out that this new layout accomodates a more horizontally-oriented strip as opposed to the vertical ones I was coming out with. So I went back and re-arranged my strips. While that may seem backwards and silly, the fact is that I wasn't entirely convinced that a vertical strip was working well. I was having trouble aranging elements in their panels without getting claustrophobic about the apparent low ceiling. I was having trouble previewing the strips in Flash because they were just too darned long (and you can't exactly scroll down in a Flash preview, or so it seems). Another result of the strips being too long is that they would require scrolling on the viewer's part, which in some way would break up the reading process. While the effect was small, it was distracting enough to me while I was testing it in a browser (even with my hand on my trusty scroll mouse, which is merely an extra limb to me, I noticed the difference.) I remember when Scott McCloud visited Northeastern, he discussed how scrolling + refresh rates = an abrasive reading experience--I think the sound effect he made was "Pap! Pap! Pap!" That may have something to do with it. Also, with vertically arranged panels, one has to break the reading line many more times than with a horizontal arrangement (something else McCloud mentioned in his books), and--as much as I hate to admit it--it is somehow distracting. It's like my perceived whole of the strip would get broken down into blocks that I could piece together logically, but not fluidly. I also found that my original took up a lot of pixel acreage as well... It didn't seem like a huge problem (aside from it exacerbating that whole scrolling issue) at first, but when I saw one of my strips in the context of this new site layout, I saw that the big pictures were somehow cumbersome. So I've gone and dealt with that while re-orienting my strips (which worked out just fine, since I had to shrink down the panels to keep the strips within an 800px minimum. Heck, if I'm lucky (or anal-retentive enough) I just might come up with a site that one doesn't really need to scroll through while trucking through the archives (it's a pet peeve of mine--I hate looking for the "next" button because my mouse isn't sitting on top of it from page to page).

I'm back at the Wellstyled.com color scheme generator seeking something less retina-searing than what I have right now. They have a little pull-down menu to show how the color scheme looks to people with various color-perception disorders. For the most part, the results of each disorder is a dulled-down version of the original. I suddenly find myself wondering if I have one of these disorders, which means what I'm producing isn't just bright, it's insanely bright. I start thinking back to eye-doctor visits, to try and remember if they do any color-perception tests. I start to think that I'm screwed if I want to design things!

...of course this train of thought is ridiculous.