TWC is obviously very different in appearance as of tonight. 

In addition to the difference in appearance, a great many things have been restructured under the hood.

Some of it, hardly matters to most of you, the bot-detection mechanisms, the way the site ranking is calculated, etc, but another feature I feel could be interesting to some of you.

Some of you will notice that the sample comic URL is no longer used.  We have, instead, created a comic calendar, where you can submit the information for one or more comics.  An entire page is dedicated to information about each and every webcomic, complete with navigation for the submitted comics.

Its entirely possible that some people, who want to  have a comic but don't want to mess with web design, could use this mechanism to control their comic.  If this is something people might be interested in, I will continue to expand this section of the site.  Everything at TWC is, so far, still free other than banner advertising, I *might* offer image hosting in the future, to help complete the webcomic package for those who might want to use TWC for their hosting.

I'm imaging this type of situation would work the best for those who are just getting into webcomics and only need a simple solution.  In the future, I hope to add comic comments like dndorks has, and a full featured archive feature.  Even more, I'd like to eventually offer some sort of "skinning" feature, though thats a lot of work and I'm not sure if I can dedicate the time without a lot of use from the community.

Anyways, I hope everyone likes the new look, the TWC engine is more streamlined and leverages a lot of the capabilities of SQL2005, so adding new features should be much easier.

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

I love the new design and features!  One thing though, the search function doesn't seem to be working correctly anymore.  For instance, my comic is called "The Many Moons of Astra" and used to come up on a search for "astra" or "moons."  Now nothing comes up for either of those keywords, but my comic is still listed.  A search for "girl" did yield 3 results, but all three were in the top 100 comics. So it seems the search feature is only working for the top 100 comics...?  Anyway, thought you aught to know.

You were 50% right.  My paging was based off of the siterank not the rownumber, so when you search for a comic, it would show maybe some, maybe no comics, but it would let you page.  So....it looked like it was only working for the top 100 because they would naturally be paged, but in reality you could just hit "next page" a couple times and it would show your comic whereever it normally would be. 

Obviously thats no good, and I got several e-mails regarding it, so I looked into the paging and changed it to being based off of row number instead of siterank, which is what it should have been in the first place.

 

Whew.  Thanks for the compliment on the site design. :) It was done by the artist from dndorks.com, Jason.

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

The site design looks good!  Lots of the webcomic list sites have been slowly (and not so slowly) degrading.  It's nice to see somebody still actively tending to his / hers.

Have you thought of expanding to print comics?

Eddie

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VOTE VITO: Line Item Vito

Thanks Eddie!

Print comics would be very interesting.  "Personally", I prefer print comics despite writing a webcomic (dndorks) and making a webcomic list (topwebcomics) and owning this site (webcomic.net), so an idea like that would be very interesting to me.  The biggest problem I see is that the webcomic owners really drive the comiclist sites, and how much would print comics want to participate?  For a voting site I don't think it would work very well at all, because you'd basically be asking people who buy print comics to go online and vote. 

"If" incentive comics were used, and the print comic said "Go here and vote every 2nd Tuesday to see a special incentive comic", maybe it would work.  Are there other print comic lists out there?

Anyways, Jenn, my wife, loves webcomics, and its how I met her (she became the colorist for dndorks.com which I had been hosting/developing for quite a while), so I spend a lot of effort in trying to figure out ways to help the community and I "love" writing for dndorks (been doing it since Christmas though the comic has been around for over 5 years). 

Addendum: Modifications to the character avatars have been made, and Jenn has taken it over.  :)  Which is just in time because the new batch of character avatars go live on the 25th and now people can stop stressing because their avatar wasn't approved yet.

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

How do I submit comics to the new calendar feature? I see a screen for displaying my submitted comics, but no button, link, or instructions for actually putting anything on it.

When you go to this page: http://topwebcomics.com/comicadmin/calendarsetup.aspx

There should be a link that says "submit new comic", clicking that link should show you a new page where you can enter a comic title, a url to the comic image (note the image, not the page where the image is displayed), a description, whether the comic is active, and what date the comic should show up.

Note you can only have 1 comic per day or the system will react in unpredictable ways.  At some point I'll add some checking to help prevent you from submitting multiple comics with the same date. 

If something doesn't work like what I posted here, post it here or e-mail me and I'll try and see about resolving the problem.

Note: There are, of course, the standard problems with sites that don't like external showing of images that have been uploaded to them.  If you use one of these sites, most likely there will be a broken image showing on TWC. :(  To resolve this issue, I'm looking at expanding the storage on this server, once I have an unlimited amount of space I'll let people host their images on TWC, until then, try and host on a site that allows external linking.

 

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

RichardM:

When you go to this page: http://topwebcomics.com/comicadmin/calendarsetup.aspx

There should be a link that says "submit new comic", clicking that link should show you a new page

I see no such link. All I see on that page is the message "Spice up your comic information page by showing several sample comics, not just one." and a set of input boxes and buttons for choosing the range of dates to show already-submitted comics.

By reading the source, it appears that I can get to the "submit" page with the URL http://topwebcomics.com/comicadmin/calendarsetup.aspx?cid=-1, and that seems to work. But it doesn't appear as a clickable link anywhere.

I have almost 300 strips already posted in my comic (I've been updating daily since last September). I don't know how many I'll want to post as samples through this system, but if it's a lot, would it be considered an abuse to use a script to mass-submit them?

Anything you can do via the comic admin manually I think is pretty fair for you to save some work by using a script.

What browser are you using?  Perhaps the link is hidden under something else due to some browser conflict. 

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

I'm using Mozilla 1.3 under Slackware Linux.

Ah, not much hope for that then.  ;)  It works under IE and firefox on windows and mac, you could try upgrading to mozilla 1.7.13, there should be a distro out there.

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

Hey!  Love what you've done with the place!  The new design is great!  I do have a little prob, though.  My Vote Avatar is expired and it has been well over 30 days since I've submitted one.  Sadly, the form for me to submit a new one is still disabled.  Help? 

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Keep Watchin' The Skies.

Hey, BTW I'm both flyingfox560 and flyingfox490.  Just wanted to let you know I'm having similar probs with this comic's Vote Avatar, as well.  Yeah, the form is still disabled for this one too.  Help again? 

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Keep Watchin' The Heavens

I'll check into it, its apparantly not detecting properly the avatars being expired

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

Update flyingfox, can you confirm for me whether or not you can submit avatars again?

 

Thanks

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes