I’ve found myself tinkering in my comic again. I’m not sure if or when I’m ready to start updating again. But one thing has been crossing my mind. If I should back up all of my lovely comments so I’ll still have them and wipe my comics. Starting anew. The reasons I feel this may be a good idea is that my audience will be long gone for the most part and my target audience will have gotten older too. And on DD all of my pages from before the wowio take over got compressed and look horrible. Some are very difficult to read now. So this would give me a much simpler way to update the pages. Thoughts?
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
How to proceed after being away for a long time
I'd say, keep the old comic and don't delete anything. If you're looking to build a new audience, you should start a new comic and just have a recap at the beginning for anything relevant carried over from the previous continuum. And if you want your old readers to know that you're updating again, you can post a notification page on your old comic.
El Cid wrote:I’ll be picking up where I left off. My biggest thing is having to reupload all 300+ pages in prologue due to the compression applied to the pages. I think I need to reshuffle some pages too. There was a 52 page print limit when I started and had already made an issue 64 pages so I cut and condensed some stuff. I did the same thing for the web version. Later I got the ability to do 64 pages in print. But never changed it here on dd because those arrows to move pages are a nightmare:p
I'd say, keep the old comic and don't delete anything. If you're looking to build a new audience, you should start a new comic and just have a recap at the beginning for anything relevant carried over from the previous continuum. And if you want your old readers to know that you're updating again, you can post a notification page on your old comic.
Anyway, the bulk of my comic is there. Maybe I should just wipe it but keep the series I started after prologue intact. Just go back to updating that one while reuploading prologue.
I agree totally with El Cid. Don't delete it.
From all my years doing reviews of comics for features this one REALLY stands out as one of the biggest lessons I've learned.
As a reader we LOVE to look at the totality of a person's work and see the HISTORY of it as well. To be able to read all their author comments and see what they were thinking about at the time as well as their reader comments lends you a lot of insight into the work and helps you engage with it a LOT more.
Just seeing something as simple as the date on the page can lend you insights and give the reader their Own associations "Oh, that was when Obama was elected! And I was going out with…"
Those poor dumb fools who delete stuff do not know what they're missing. It's like a massive chunk of their history and achievement is wiped from reality.
Sure, you can re-upload but it's just not the same. Not at all.
JustNoPoint wrote:I thiiiink that was fixed :/
Do I still need to be sure my images are named something unique from images found elsewhere? I remember there was a bug where it’d replace all images in the comic that had the same name.
I can't recall. Alexey fixed so many of the bugs.
I'll do a test.
Alrighty, I just attempted to add a new page to the front of my comic. So I used the arrows to move the page down (and back in time) but it seems I cannot move the page to another page of the file editor. Like, I'm on page 1 of 16 ;_; in the manage pages part. I moved the page I wanted to add to the bottom but there is no way to continue moving said page any further back in time.
Not to mention that thumbing pages through the arrows of 16 pages of manager is simply going to be horrible. And I'll have to do it with 4-6 more pages after this.
What should I do?
Start all over. Post the new comic with all the additions, revisions and whatever you want. Those compressed images are not worth keeping. If you want to keep all the wonderful comments, save the pages or just the text and then quote it as you want in your author comments. If you want to overwhelm new readers with the 300 page archive, go for it.
I recommend pacing yourself so you don't go crazy posting 300 pages in one sitting or in a couple of days. I doing this right now with my hunk of junk. I am taking the opportunity with all kinds of revisions and additions because things are different since the first version was done in 2003-8.
Creating a whole new comic gives a creator the chance to fix or change everything freely. Complete artistic freedom to reimagine or not and even just tweak a little.
You'll be amazed at what you want to change and what you don't.
I don't WANT to change anything =p It's just that there are pages that are combined in ways in issue 1 that they were not meant to be combined in. Due to print limits at the time. And I wanted the comics on the web to reflect the physical copies so long ago I removed some pages and inserted the cut and combined variants. Later on the page limit was increased so I was able to go for the page count I had intended. On my devonlegacy.com site the comic is as it should be. I'd like to simply make the Prologue here at DD match what is on devonlegacy.com. DD is my home. It's where my comic started. It should have the comic as it is meant to be read!
Deleting and reuploading again was my 1st thought but was told that's not the best way to approach this. But since I need to ADD some pages to the past I don't know what else I can do.
Of course, I forgot you're perfect. ;)
To change format you have to re-post. Think it about it as if it was a printed page– a format change means the page must be reprinted. In computer terms that is repost.
We've gotten lazy in this digital age. Cut and paste used to mean actually cutting and pasting which meant you had to reprint the page and changing page order meant rebinding the book. (I go back to 'zines and newsletters when you had to do that. Finish stapling the copies of something and realize your forgot page 11 or that page 3 and 2 are transposed. )
I always want to tweak something because I do crap, as well you know, so it can always be tweaked and changed.
No no, believe me there are TONS of things I'd like to change! I just would rather put that effort into future pages and not revisit stuff I finished years back is all =p
But yeah, unless Ozone has an alternative idea I really think I'll have no choice but to purge and re post if I want to add some pages in.
First off: yay for DL ooming back!
Second off, why don't you leave your current archive as is, and just start a new comic? That way you can have it all. The old version (and comments) in the 'archived' comic and the new version being what you want it to be.
If someone suggested this already apologies, I'm too lazy to read through the thread right now…
Devon legacy prologue HD remix directors cut? Confusion aside that may be the best way to go. Thanks for the idea tantz! And I’m always happy to see you still around! DL may still be a ways away from returning but scripting and new pages have already begun to be created! ^_^
I was going to suggest the same thing as Tantz! Make a new archive sounds like the ideal choice, I've done that with my comic as I'm slowly replacing old pages in a different archive.
The one drawback is you'll have to really plug hard to get people to notice the new archive location, but then again that's no more different than trying to get new eyes on it after wiping the archive!
But I have to toss in my agreement with generally disliking when people delete their entire history– even if the pages look wonky with compression. Believe it or not, readers do enjoy reading the other comment discussions going on, even in older pages– they like to see if others are sharing the same experience or noticed the things they noticed. Even if it's in an entire different archive that you're directing people away from! And it's not just comments either, author's notes are an important piece of history for a reader. Even if ostensibly there are new readers going through the new archive, they might be curious to check a corresponding page in the old archive to see what you said about it back then when they become aware that there is history for the comic. Having to mass-upload I don't imagine you'll be wanting to copy/paste every page's notes!
Perhaps also, replace a few of the worst offenders in the readability department with the uncompressed file and post an image in the author's notes guiding people to the newer archive. Readers in your old archive will absolutely take notice when a page is suddenly crystal-clear. Or you could replace a few key pages (where it won't take away too much impact from the proceedings) with a message pasted on the top or bottom of the page itself letting them know there's a better place to read this archive now!
(I'd also recommend a banner link to the new archive if you decide on that, placed right under the current title banner, directing something like: "attention readers, improved archive link here"!)
Also, oh man that page manager… I could've sworn I mentioned it as a complaint before (I've lost track of complaints :P) that you get to the bottom of the page and there's no DOWN arrow, or even a "move to previous page" option, if you want it more than 19 pages back you're screwed. It would be nice if at least it opened up the option of "move image to page ___?" and then let us scoot it into place from that page.
Maybe round 3 of DD improvement we can get on the archive management stuff. The wowio people were not comic people and did not understand how large archives are managed and what a pain having to inch a page down is. I have… many things to say about the control panel here.
An ideal archive manager would let us see all the pages in our archive and let us drag/drop pages in blocks or even insert pages. It might be difficult in the bounds of DD's current coding, but I know it's not impossible as a concept since I've seen it elsewhere.
Amelius wrote:Yep, the page manager is total crap.
An ideal archive manager would let us see all the pages in our archive and let us drag/drop pages in blocks or even insert pages. It might be difficult in the bounds of DD's current coding, but I know it's not impossible as a concept since I've seen it elsewhere.
If you can describe a system that would be perfect for DD then I can propose it to Alexey.
"move to next page" is good for a start but not when you have to move a page 500 spots or a block of pages. So yeah, drag and drop or dragging and dropping blocks… or even just renumbering them.
Technically I don't think it would be hard because moving pages just involves re-numbering their index number- AND the index number of every other page.
That is a HUGE pain for me to do manually on a comic with a big archive, but would probably be quite a bit easier to automate.
JustNoPoint wrote:It works but that's a bad bodge.
Comic Fury allows you to do it by using the date and time. So you can upload into the past.
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