blackUnicorn.org

Okay, folks, consider this fair warning: If you enjoyed looking at SnoogleZoo as it is right now, that is to say walls of text, very small pictures and a really cumbersome system for delivering cute wallpapers, go soak it in because I’m going to take it all down and reboot the whole thing.

It’s not working the way it is. And I mean that in just about every sense. The gallery plugin I was using suddenly decided that it didn’t want to have anything uploaded anymore. I mean the link to the upload screen literally disappeared. In trying to fix it I almost killed the whole site, and had to revert to a couple of days-ago backup to bring it back up.

And in and amongst all this drama of trying to get it back up and struggling with the whole system I realised that organizing the site under a CMS was actually limiting what I could do creatively with SnoogleZoo in the first palce. For instance, I always had the intention to start a comic. And I was having trouble serving up the wallpapers satisfactorally, so I put story development on the back burner. Maybe the characters would just blog, or I’d do online storybooks?

So I was basically letting the Content Management System dictate the nature of the content, and that’s backwards! So I spent my friday night reading comics, drawing pictures and thinking about how to start the story. For now I’m going to leave SZ up the way it is while I work on getting the story and the first couple of comics together. Meanwhile I’ll be looking into a good way to manage a visually-based website with lots of extras (ComicPress is looking very promising!), and once that’s all ready to go I’ll do the official launch!

Honestly? I couldn’t be happier about the way this has worked out. I leared a lot playing with Mambo, even if I’m not ultimately going to use it, and now I have a laser-focus as to what I’m doing with SnoogleZoo. I’m so excited to finally get this party started the right way!

Technorati Tags: cms, comicpress, comics, snooglezoo, starting over, webcomics