Blog integration
March 18th, 2006Well, this past week, I finally finished the first stage of a project I’d been working on… getting the blog portion of this website integrated more tightly with the rest of the site. Now, the last five blog entries appear on the main page, complete with the number of comments for each and a link to make comments. Moreover, every last Monkey Law strip now has its own entry in the blog, which is intended to make commenting on particular strips more effective.
That’s phase one.
By the end of phase two, the blog archive will BE the comic archive. Traveling to a past strip will bring up that strip’s blog entry. The “previous” and “next” arrows will be rewired to take you through the blog rather than navigating through my own proprietary system for archiving comics.
Why am I doing this? Well, lots of webcomics artists like DJ Coffman swear by the use of blog software to archive comics. For one thing, there is automatic notification of sites like Technorati whenever a post is made, and also automatic RSS syndication of every post. An enterprising fan added a LiveJournal profile for Monkey Law which takes advantage of the RSS feed — now you can add ML as your friend in LiveJournal! How fucking cool is that? I’m exploring other syndication features, like how to stick ML on Myspace, as well.
The next thing I need to work on is some new graphics for usability… if the blog archive is the comic archive, then it has to be readily apparent whether clicking on the “next” button is going to take you to the next blog post or the next comic. Basically, it should be possible for people to go from strip to strip without having to read my stupid-ass blog posts in between. And people should be inversely be able to read the blog without dealing with the comic. I can make this happen, while still making everything syndicate together. Isn’t that cool?
So, basically, if anyone thinks there are usability problems with the blog archives as they stand now, please let me know so I can address this before getting into writing the new code for comics.
Oh yeah, also, tell everyone you know to read Monkey Law. That has nothing to do with the blog, I just don’t feel it gets said enough. 
March 18th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Wow man, you’ve done a heck of a job integrating this into your site. Looks incredibly awesome, maybe one of the best I’ve seen.
March 18th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Thanks, DJ! The magic bullet I discovered was “define (’WP_USE_THEMES’,'true’) in WP’s default index.php file. Get rid of that, and you can put anything in that index.php file you want and it won’t give control over to the theme. I just took that “require(’./blog/wp-blog-header.php’)” command and a loop and shoehorned it into my already-existing index file.