 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
07-11-2005:
Gremlin World is updated thrice weekly. Every Monday, a new image is added to the gallery. Every Wed and Friday, a new comic page is added to the archives. Please enjoy and give us lots of comments!
Oh yeah. For every $100 donated, Anthony will immediately draw and post an extra comic page. This way, he can do more Gremlin World and still afford his beans and rice! There's also a special image for donaters. So if you want to see more Gremlin World, you know what to do!
Gremlin World is updated thrice weekly. Every Monday, a new image is added to the gallery. Every Wed and Friday, a new comic page is added to the archives. Please enjoy and give us lots of comments!
Oh yeah. For every $100 donated, Anthony will immediately draw and post an extra comic page. This way, he can do more Gremlin World and still afford his beans and rice! There's also a special image for donaters. So if you want to see more Gremlin World, you know what to do!
(c) 2004-2008 aswembar
This Kanna pic is supposed to go with the Yuki pic from the previous illustration day. Unfortunatley the background didn't come out as well as I wanted it to, but this is still a really good piece, I think.
Hey all! As you've no doubt noticed by now, the website has undergone some changes. What you most likely have not noticed is that, essentially, the coding has been completely redone from scratch. Even though I kept the layout and the old images, I redid everything else. Yup, I redid it all myself over the long July 4th weekend; no borrowed code. So I'm going to go over the changes. Y'know, to let you know about all the new features, and I guess to brag a little.
First of all, I want to mention the shoutbox to the top right. This is a comment area, so you can comment on the comic, give suggestions, or just say something. Or play with the paicons. Just fill in a comment and press the "comment" button (name and email/url are suggested, but they are not neccessary.) The shoutbox displays the last 20 comments and right now, there is no limit on the comment length. I might need to add that later though. I'd like feedback on this. Like... should I add an option to open a larger version in another window? And would you like different emoticon sets? Show them all or use a random character? Yup, I'm in the mood for suggesstions even. Oh yeah, the email/url are linked to from the name part of your comment... we don't use them for any hideous purposes.
Secondly, the bookmark options for the comic pages. This may be the most ambiguous of all, so I'll try to explain it here. I figured that since this comic has a neccessary continuity and you can't expect people to read every update, it would be nice to be able to save your spot. So I made a bookmark system (later, I found out that other people have already done this, probably more efficiently too, but oh well.) Anyways, I added the bar to the bottom of all comic images. Clicking on "Place a Bookmark" bookmarks the current page and causes a new link to appear in the grey bar at the top, "Go To Bookmark". Clicking that brings you to the page where you clicked "Place a Bookmark". If you click "Place a Bookmark" on another page, your bookmark is replaced. If a bookmark is placed, a "Remove Bookmark" link appears and it does exactly what you'd expect it to do. Lastly, there is a link called "Goto Bookmark on X". It's defaulted to "Click", which means you need to click the "Go To Bookmark" link to go to the bookmark. If you click when X is "Load", whenever you visit the main page you'll be automatically brought to your bookmark. Nifty, right? Anyways, the bookmarks are set via cookies (good idea or bad?) and they will live for two months (about the length of a world.) So... it won't work if you've disabled cookies. Anyways, let me know what you think of this and its implementation and if it should stay or go, or what.
Thirdly, the character polls. Access this by clicking on "Characters" on the sidebar (do I need to make it more visible?) Click on a character to vote for them. If you don't know who they are, a little box pops up to remind you, or something. Anthony is working on specialized images for each character, but don't expect them anytime soon. The results are at the bottom, complete with nifty bars to show their rankings relative to each other. We'll add more as more characters are introduced, though we may gloss over minor characters. Oh yeah, you can vote once every 24 hour period. That means after placing a vote, you have to wait 24 hours before you can vote again, or else it won't work. If people want, I can change this to be you can vote once per day (like 12PM Monday and 8AM Tuesday instead of 12PM Monday and 1PM Tuesday.) But, you're going to have to ask if you want me to do that... not because it's hard, but because I'm lazy. ^_^ Oh yeah, on the site's anniversary (for simplicity's sake, it's set to November 1st), Anthony will draw a special image or comic of the winning character. We'll try to do this every year (and we'll start this year, so look forward to November.)
Fourthly, the whole website is now database driven instead of date driven. This means several things to you guys. First of all, it means the website is much faster. Secondly, it means a better organization of sections, so that new ideas like the Gremlin Graphitti can be integrated better into the site. Thirdly, it means that archive sections are updated the day of the change (I don't know if you've noticed that this wasn't the case before.) Lastly, it means I could set up a system to allow the Aswembar staff to post news more easily, so hopefully we'll have a lot more rants (or Pinheaded Press) for you guys.
Finally, the cosmetic changes. Like, we added a cover for the Gremlin Graphitti stuff, an additional navigation bar beneath the comic, etc... it's not all that important. Oh, but I did fix the stuff that did not work in firefox (like the world chooser), so Gremlin World should be completely firefox friendly now.
And... that's all I've got to say. It was a lot, hopefully you got all of it. If not, that's okay, I'll make sure this rant stays up for a week or so, so you can review and stuff. Maybe put it up in the story section. To end off, I want to ask for your help. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE post in the shoutbox or forums if you see anything that I need to fix. Or if there's any suggestions you'd like to make. Or if there's anything you don't like. Or if there's anything else you'd like me to implement. Basically, any comments at all (design-wise or otherwise) are very, very much wanted. For example, please let me know if you guys would like me to add ranking of each and every comic (from a scale of 1 to 5, so Anthony knows which pages work and don't work well.) Good idea or dumb idea? And so on... okay, I'll leave you all alone, now go and have fun!