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!

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

First of all, it’s the 64th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy.  I mention this because my dad was an Army ranger at the time and he was there that day.

Second, I’m leaving for Vegas this afternoon. I’ve been alternately practicing for the tournament and stressing out about it for the last week, which has thrown off my already wobbly routine of updating this here blog and working on SnoogleZoo. For better or worse, I will get back on track at the end of next week. Also, watch this sapce this weekend, as I will be posting some kind of update of my progress.

Thirdly, I was playing with Plurk last night and I think it’s pretty neat (albeit slow-loading just yet). If anybody wants in I can has invite.

You may have noticed that I did not post a Panda Thursday last week.

I have a deadline on a paying project coming up, so my usual time for Panda Thursday was taken up by that, and I ate through my buffer. But my real problem appears to be that, once I’ve filled up the whole front page of my blog with pandas by posting every Thursday and no other time, I just get sick and tired of drawing pandas.

So what do I do?

Panda Thursday was meant to be an exercise in making sure I’m drawing and posting to my blog at least once a week. I think I can still do that, but be more flexible about it by adding more creatures to more days, and mandating an update of at least one. That’ll keep me from feeling so stagnant after a million pandas.

So, I need some help coming up with creatures. I want to do Monster Monday, Panda Thursday (natch), Fish Friday ( because we used to be Catholic). But what about Tuesday and Wednesday? If you have a suggestion, leave me a comment. The creature doesn’t have to be an alliteration of the day of the week, unless it’s too awesome to pass up.

Tags: being blocked

You’re probably asking yourself when I’m finally going to commit to one of these new projects. Well, the problem with how to draw animals was twofold. First, it was very labor intensive to produce a post. Second, I was getting very little feedback.

I’ve been working on snooglezoo and trying to give it direction for some time, it’s no longer just a cafepress store, because who cares about that? Here’s the deal- you send me some words, and I’ll draw a picture to go with it. Sort of like exploding dog, only not so stick-figurey, and probably more cute animals. ‘Cause that’s how I roll.

Alright! I think we’re in business! If you see something weird just hit ctrl and refresh and hopefully it’ll resolve itself. If it doesn’t, please email me or leave a comment!

I found a good Wordpress theme to tweak and make my own- still working the kinks out and getting some of the doodads like my twitter feed and some other things off of the old site, but I’m already feeling quite at home in my new digs. I’ve been wanting to make the switch over to WordPress for quite some time because of how extensible it is, but my old hosting plan didn’t support any databases (hey it’s cheap, though, right? Yeah, remember what happened back in April? I guess you get what you pay for.)

Anyway, I’m on a shiny new host now, with Control Panel software I’ve actually heard of, and databases and plugins and all kinds of good stuff. I’m going to host all my websites from here- which doesn’t mean much to you guys, but it’s great for me, because the number is growing.

One of the best things that does have bearing on you guys is I’m going to be able to get my old email address back! I haven’t set it up yet, but I probably will look into it before I go to bed. I want spam filters in place before I even think about getting it back in place, y’know?

Anyway, back to work, there’s still lots to do!