Hello Everyone!
April 4, 2023
Welcome to the official website for my webcomic. Kind of felt like the “web” part was required, and since I’ve spent much of the last 20 years making websites I figured I could make that happen. I have been posting to Instagram for a while, but it just doesn’t feel official. This isn’t an “instacomic”. So I wrote some quick requirements and decided to just dive in! After two decades, you’d think I’d have gotten rid of the urge to say “How hard could it be?”
It is always, always, difficult.
As with the rest of this project, I can’t seem to do anything the easy or simple way. My comics take anywhere from 8 to 10 hours because of the ‘newsprint’ style I’ve chosen to use. Why would the website be any simpler? My requirements were I thought pretty minimal and achievable:
- Custom Theme coded as minimally as possible in WordPress
- No fancy plugins. Code the main functionality into the theme.
- Custom Post Type for “Comics” that keeps this Blog separate
- Make it responsive! Comic Posts have a four-panel “desktop” image and four single-panel “mobile” images. For maximum readability regardless of device.
- Future features: Sharing, External Links, Shop
I’ve been coding in WordPress for a long time, but it’s been several years since I was actually coding themes from scratch. It’s been so long, in fact, that the way I code is now called a “Classic” theme. Of course! I’m aging out of more and more as time goes on. I decided against learning the new “Block” method. There was no way I was going to pull off what I needed to do and learn a whole new coding style. I’m amazed how far WP has advanced in the last 15 years.
The biggest roadblock was the “responsive” requirement. I could have hacked something together but I wanted to basically post all five images on each comic, and have CSS display them for the user depending on their device width. Doing this required me to learn how to add more “featured” images to a custom post type. No small feat, indeed! It took a couple days, but I finally had something working that I considered “functional”. I can specify all five images and display them conditionally.
There’s a lot more to do. I still don’t have links to my social media, even. But I think I’m good to call it a ‘beta’ and proceed with adding content! I hope I don’t end up blowing up the database and losing all of this. Stay tuned!
