Posts Tagged ‘humanity’
2 items.
First things first. Hello, and Happy New Year!
As you can see, I’ve redesigned the site. This is something I’ve promised for a long time and have been working on even longer. Since October of 2007, if you can believe it. This thing has gone through so many revisions and so many different ups and downs, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to finally bring it to you.
The new site is being powered by WordPress and Tyler Martin’s excellent ComicPress content management system. Tyler was of great personal help to me putting the finishing touches on the site. He helped me not only to customize the archive, but with some of the CSS and page layout as well. He was a very patient teacher and a great help. If you have a webcomic, you NEED WordPress and you NEED ComicPress running things behind the scenes.
Of course, there were others who helped me along the way. I cannot understate the value that my good friend Brian Arnold brought to the project. Brian is a good friend of the site and has actually being hosting Theater Hopper for years. Not only that, but he’s been my go-to guy when things go kerflooey. He has an amazing talent for scripting and is always willing to help. I can’t tell you how many jams this guy has pulled me out of, but in regard to this latest revision, he was INVALUABLE in helping to transfer over 1,000 pages of content from the old database into WordPress. I can’t tell you how much time that saved and I am truly grateful.
Words of thanks also have to go out to Steve Wallace, who was an early contributor to the project. Steve helped me get my head around WordPress and helped me piece together a few layouts.
And last but not least, I have to once again thank David Buist. Dave put together the original PHP database that managed Theater Hopper for years and years practically from scratch. It was a great system, but I would always find a way to break it. He was always very patient and helpful when I sent panicked e-mails to him in the dead of the night. I have to thank him for his contribution or else Theater Hopper would have never lasted this long — and that’s the truth.
I’m taking special care to give a shout-out to all of these guys because this redesign was not an easy process for me. It forced me to adopt some new technologies that I didn’t completely understand and these guys patiently showed me the way. The best I could do was come up with the look and feel. These guys helped make it fly. This change would not have been a success without them. Thank you, guys.
Now, on to business.
There are a lot of big changes all around the site, but I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much at one time. I encourage you to look around. Hopefully you’ll notice that there aren’t as many dead links in the navigation like there was before!
Most prominently, I’ve brought back the Theater Hopper THorum. So, if you’re looking for a place to hang out and talk to other fans of the comic about movies or whatever, it’s open for business!
I’m moderating the board very heavily at the moment because the last THorum was overrun by spammers. I’m approving everyone individually right now, so it might take some time before you can participate. But I’m very much interested in cultivating a community aroud Theater Hopper and plan on working hard to make the THorum the kind of place that I want to hang out as well. So once you’re in the door, you’re going to like it a lot. I promise.
In the meantime, the second big addition are comments under every blog post. If the THorum sounds like too much of an investment, this is your opportunity to leave your thoughts and contribute to the discussion in a different way!
Comment areas can sometimes be dodgy and I’ve had some contemporaries talk me out of including them. But I plan on heavily moderating these as well. If things get hairy, I’ll take care of it. But, for now, I’m interested in them as an avenue for instant feedback to the strip, the site or whatever.
So what do you say we test them out? What do you think of the new site? Do you see any room for improvement? Some easy fixes I could make? What do you like about it? Let me know in the comments below and thanks for visiting!
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I had a lot of fun drawing Tom’s wild mood swings in today’s comic. Always fun to do a little cartoon-y over exaggeration.
Cami and I didn’t see Valentine’s Day over the weekend and our lives were no less the richer for it. But I must admit that I was surprised by it’s $52 million haul at the box office.
This goes back to what I was talking about on Friday. I think people were pre-disposed to seeing this movie by virtue of it’s branding. They felt compelled to see a movie CALLED Valentine’s Day ON Valentine’s Day. It’s the laziest, easiest response to “Hey, we need something to do for our Valentine’s Day together. I know what we should do!”
I’m certain the large cast had something to do with it as well. The producers basically played the odds and gambled that at least ONE of those actors would get you to buy a ticket. It looks like their gamble paid off.
I hope the success of Valentine’s Day doesn’t spur a bunch of copycat movies that stack the deck with 2 dozen different well-known actors. Having so many big names to feature makes it sound like the story doesn’t support them. I mean, you can’t really develop that many characters at once and be successful. Even Love, Actually – which has built up a lot of good will over the years – falls down on this point.
My sister-in-law saw Valentine’s Day with friends and my wife asked her a lot of questions about it. I think it reflects the “car crash” interest in this movie. People want to watch it because they want to see if they can pull it off. According to my sister-in-law, they don’t.
I won’t spoil anything for you in case you want to see it, but she referenced two different points in the script where the audience audibly groaned at the contrivance on screen. So, buyer beware.
I will say this… For those of you thinking about going to see this movie for Julia Roberts, my sister-in-law warns that she is on screen for about 6 minutes. But, again, considering there are 19 different actors in this thing and the movie is 125 minutes long… an appearance of about 6 minutes is pretty much on the nose. Do the math. It shakes out right.
I’m curious if anyone here saw Valentine’s Day this weekend. If so, what were your thoughts? Feel free to leave your comments below!
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