Added 1 new A* page:Well I came across a pretty neat webcomic today that I wanted to show you, but it appears to have disappeared just as I meant to link to it. :| Hopefully it will come back just as magically; I've been corresponding with the author so presumably they will be aware of the problem shortly. Anyway it had a really lovely use of grays and lines and things like that that I'm not very good at.
Got a couple more kinks ironed out in the comic display scripts today--nothing you'd notice, hopefully, but just minor errors, some of which had been bothering me for some time. What was making this particularly bothersome was that I've had the comic display handled by two separate scripts: one that pushes out the news articles, updates the RSS, and writes out the site's front page, and another that displays all the *rest* of the comic pages; so they share parts in common but had a lot of different bits breaking up the common bits, and over time as I would tweak things here and there, errors would creep in where I tweaked one one way and one the other, and then other tweaks came in on top of those, etc, until I could look at the Perl scripts for them and hardly know what I was seeing. ;P I assume this is not proper scripting procedure. :PP
So anyway one reason then that I'm excited about converting the site to a dynamic front page thing (which will be going along with getting cookie-based subscriptions working) is that the comic display will all be handled by a single script. Whew! That will make future changes much easier, I think, and anyway will give rise to many fewer little annoying layout glitches and inconsistencies.
Oh and I've already changed those silly Photoshop macros for handling the scanned A* pages that I showed you just the other day--I removed the smart blur and unsharp mask steps. See, when I first started painting and scanning the page, the paper grain, which my scanner rather seems to amplify, sort of scared me and I wanted to try to minimize its appearance. But I like *painting* on grainy paper, and anyway it isn't really possible to get rid of all the grain and still keep the small details of the painting intact (pencil lines were coming through those extra processing steps quite spottily, for instance), so I think I just have to accept the grain and roll with it. Anyway the pages now have fewer processing steps between painting and web displaying, so even if grainy they look a bit more natural and preserve their detail better; I reprocessed all the hand-painted pages with them already, so they should be looking very slightly snappier than they were previously.
EDIT: Bleh, now today they look too soft without sharpening. Sharpened 'em up even stronger than before (and also no Smart Blur) now. I'm liking the crispness. Hopefully I'll still like it tomorrow! ;D
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