Page 353 - February 19, 2013

He made it! Hurray! No-one died! Tomorrow we'll see what Hannu is seeing, and it's a nice page, I can tell you that much.

Looks like most people found the new commenting system acceptable, which is very good because it pretty much seems like there are only thee major systems to choose from for sites like this that aren't built on a blog platform like Wordpress: Disqus, Livefyre and Intensedbate. Intensedebate was the one we had previously, but sadly it turned out to not be suitable for large amounts of comments. Even more sadly there appears to be no active development team behind it anymore, so none of the issues will be fixed. Disqus is the main player that most people use these days, but they removed practically all customization options last year, so nope! Don't want the bottom part of the site to scream "welcome to my tech-blog, let's talk about the new x-ray goggles everyone!" So that leaves Livefyre, which functions and loads very much like Disqus, but still allows for appearance tweaks. And it has a active development team working on it so, hopefully any lingering issues will be improved as time goes by. Okay, a couple of quick notes on how to use it:

For italics, bold or underlined text press the little pen icon in the lower left corner of the comment box. No HTML markup here.
If you want to post as a guest the comment system wants an email address, but it will access a completely fake one too. Then when it asks if you want to make an Livefyre account, just press the "post as guest" link in the lower right hand corner. But making an account (and always having your username ready for you when you stop by) apparently only requires a password to go with your username, so might as well do that while you're at it!

The one thing I haven't been able to change is the size of the text in the comment box as you're typing, which is kind of small by default. It's served through an iframe so I can't access the code. But maybe that will be solved in the future.

~

And that's all for to-no wait, I had a question for you guys! How do you feel about some kind of streaming-drawing-session-thingie of me drawing a page? Or at least the digital part of it. This seems to be common practice among webcomic artists these days, and I figured that could be kind of fun to at least try out once. I was planning on making a tutorial/walkthrough of how I draw each page anyway, and putting up a live video of the process for you all to watch would add a lot to that. And of course 'm going to make the page for the tutorial a standalone extra so that we avoid spoilers of the actual story. So... livestream/ustream session, any interest?