Michael Desing
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Cool! Glad you fixed the problem.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
My best guess is that you have the comic appear in the content column… from your Dashboard, it’s Appearance -> Customize -> Layout Options… you probably have the box checked that says “Put the Comic in the Content Column”, which will force it to fit within the frame based on your layout rather than letting it take the full expanse of available real estate, which I think is what you want.
I’m guessing, and I’m still pretty new to this myself, but that seems to be what’s going on.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Oh, and Margaret’s suggestion on turning off the Jetpack Mobile Theme solved that problem. I still have to optimize for mobile devices, but at least my webcomic can be seen on them now.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Thanks, Brad. I think I have come close to a solution on almost everything… fortunately, Dreamhost was able to restore my website within a half an hour. I went to bed on the verge of depression, and woke up to find my page running as if it had never missed a beat. I will definitely be making the backup.
I will work on my cast page tomorrow (crosses fingers) and hopefully have the site up and running at 100% (at least as far as I see it).
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Thanks, Margaret, that’s quite helpful.
‘The Link’ was a reference to Brad’s post on character tags… forgot to link it.
I truly appreciate the feedback and clarification.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Aaaannnnnd…. I just deleted my entire website. Poof. Gone.
I was trying to delete a folder using Filezilla client, and all of a sudden it was deleting everything. By the time I realized what was happening and closed Filezilla, almost everything was gone.
I’m not even joking.
Know how people always say that you can’t break the Internet? I just did… at least for me.
Wow.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Okay… I’ve made a little progress. I never connected the dots with the tutorial Brad created several weeks back and using Filezilla to make this stuff work. I’m starting to see the light. I still thought I had to ftp into my site through Dreamhost… I didn’t realize this was what I should be using Filezilla FOR. Wow. Okay. Starting to make sense…
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
And now a follow up question… people using mobile devices (both have been on iphones) say that the comic does not display on their device… takes them to my page, but no comic displays. Suggestions?
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
As an addendum, I letter the original (large) image… I don’t bother reducing the strip for the web first and then letter that after. It would be double the work for no benefit. I want the clean master large version and the smaller web version to be exactly the same, and the conversion to png doesn’t lose enough clarity (if any at all compared to putting the text on the smaller version) to make the double work worth it. My originals are 7760 pixels wide as tiffs (typically about 2 MB each), whereas my web versions are 1000 pixels in PNG (so about 150 kb each).
And I ‘cheat’ for word balloons… I leave white space at the top of each panel (about the top 1/4 is empty each image), and use the “Bloom County” pointer to the head to indicate the speaker. No word balloons = no need to exactly plan the space for lettering. It’s worked out very nicely for me, and fits the tone of the strip, so it’s a win/win.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
If I printed my ‘originals’ at full size, the text would be huge… but I’m never going to print them that size. I know that when they appear in a print edition down the road, it will be roughly equivalent to how the strip looks on my web site (except cleaner, because the original files are tiffs, and I use PNGs on my site). When I look at the original text on my computer screen at 100%, each letter is about an inch tall. Maybe if I was going to turn a strip into a bumper sticker…
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
The only suggestion I have would be to do a few trial word balloons, scan them, reduce them, and see how they look. I started lettering my strip at 60 point DigitalStrip, but once I had a few done and posted, I realized the font looked a little small on the page, so I upgraded to 72 point and it seems to have worked out well for me. It’s trial and error. My original panel drawings are done at about 4″ x 6″ before I scan them, if that gives you an idea.
As far as text… less is more. Practice getting what you want to say into the fewest words possible. There is almost always a way to rearrange the grammar of the sentence to eliminate redundancy and tighten things up. Again, trial and error will get you there.
If you are looking for a number, I find anything more than 25 words is pushing it for any one panel.
Hope this helps.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
And as an FYI, I’m in a similar position to you… just learning this whole thing, and getting frustrated once in a while by a dead end. I’d recommend NOT paying someone else to solve the problem for you, ever. You want to learn how the site works, so that you have total control. I’m finding it’s worth the time now to figure it out. I’d rather have fewer bells and whistles, but know exactly how those bells and whistles work. I’ll add layers of awesome as I go. I have ZERO programming experience (I still can’t remember if it’s ‘CSS’ or ‘CCS’ and get that wrong all the time), and still manage to run a site.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Okay… I’m trying to put up the character page for my webcomic (teachingted.com), and I’ve been following the directions in the link… when I get to the part where I can edit CSS and shouldn’t panic, I’m panicking… that style.ccs opens a window with about 3 metric tons of code that I’ve tried to sift through a few times, and can’t find a spot to start plugging in the individual character code. I assume I can’t just drop it in at the end of the code, but it has to go somewhere specific, and I have no idea where that is.
Thanks.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Thanks guys, that helps!
I don’t see any way (nor do I want to try) to restrict individual use by teachers. I HOPE that strips are routinely printed out and posted in faculty rooms or are printed out and stuck in the mailboxes of a handful of colleagues. I’m thinking more along the lines of regional training centers that publish regular newsletters that go out to hundreds of (or more) teachers, or individual district union newsletters that get distributed to all the teachers in a district. These are often 4-6 page old school print newsletters. I’d think that they’d take advantage of an opportunity to pop in a strip that I’ve done about the Common Core (for instance) next to an article they’re doing about the Common Core in their district… I just want to create a simple, clear set of directions for those who want to do that. The idea is that, per individual publication, you could use one strip without a problem. I don’t want a union newsletter to be four pages, with two of those being every strip I’ve done for the last few weeks…
I appreciate the feedback.
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
Thanks, guys. I will download that and start playing around. I can’t break the Internet too badly…
Mike Desing | Army Ants / Teaching Ted
