Glass Under My Skin

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Glib and Glamour


I just don't care about this blog today. I'm all blogged out. Y'see, I've been working on a site for my new web comic and for the last two days it's been a pain in the ass. But at least I've made some progress and that's better than when I tried before.

I decided, a few of months ago, to use something called "WordPress" to make my new site. It's blogging software that's widely used and seems to work fine for everybody else. A plugin for WordPress called "ComicPress" is specifically made for web comic sites. With the two I could combine my blog and web comic. I could also upload comics ahead of time and it would load them day by day. Easy to update is what I'm after.

That's why I rarely update my jaredosborn.com site. It's an html site that I made in a program called "Freeway" and it's just too much of a pain to update. The site is graphics heavy which makes it cumbersome to change things all the time. I want a different solution for my web comic.

When I first started implementing WordPress I knew I was getting off on the wrong foot by messing with it too close to bedtime. Never start doing work that gets your mind racing close to bedtime. You'll be too tired to work effectively plus won't be able to shut your mind down to sleep. But I messed around anyway. Couldn't get anything done. Couldn't sleep. Just as I suspected but I thought I could sneak one in.

The next time I tried it to get WordPress installed correctly I was full of confidence that things would be up and running shortly. And after a little while they were. Then I tried to get ComicPress up and running. Oh boy. Error after error. I had no idea what was going wrong.

I went on every help site, read lots of forum posts, scoured FAQs, and tried everything they said but I still couldn't get things to work properly. I must have tried to get ComicPress to work at least three different times. I just never could. Other people had sites up using it so it must work but I couldn't make it go. So I just left it for a month or two. I couldn't face it. I continued to make comic strips but I stopped figuring out how to post them.

On Friday I decided to start designing the site in Freeway. It would take more work to keep it running but at least I knew I could do it. I worked on some logos, basic designs, and got things going. Things went fine but at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that if I wanted the site to run smoothly I'd better give ComicPress another try. So I did.

Saturday morning bright and early (I'm a morning person, another reason I shouldn't have started near bedtime) I wiped everything clean from my server and database, downloaded the things I needed, and started again. A couple of hours later and much to my surprise I had ComicPress up and running. Shock of shocks.

The site still looks awful since I have to modify the basic design and haven't figured out how to do that properly yet but now I can upload and schedule strips and blogs. That's what I want to be able to do. Ugly and functional I can live with.

I haven't done much web design in my time but I finally figure out why there is so much bad web design out there. The "Web Safe" color palette that web designers work with has almost no neutral colors in it. Maybe just a couple.

Neutral colors are they key to color. They're not too bright, not to dull, not too white, and not too dark. They put all the other colors in context. The world has lots of neutral colors in it and they make bright colors brighter and dark colors darker. Web colors are mostly too bright or too dark. The reason half the web is designed with grey gunmetal and light blue colors are that they are as close to neutrals as you're going to get with web safe color. Who ever designed the web safe color palette was no artist.

So anyway that's why I'm tired of this whole blog thing. It's much easier to deal with when there is only creative work to do.

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