How to easily navigate in my online comic website?

January 21, 2006 10:34 PM

Website Content Management Q: I'm setting up a website for my online comic and have no idea what script is needed (or possible) to automate the "previous" and "next" navigation buttons to show a strip to my visitors on a page they haven't yet visited. Make sense? Also, are there any easy to install scripts that automatically update my site by posting today's strip that I have previously uploaded (so I don't have to upload or change code every single day)???
posted by catcatwomanman to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Easiest way to do this is with a server-side script in PHP or Ruby on Rails. What you do is name each strip so that it has the date as an 8 digit number (eg 20060122 today) so that they can be sorted alphabetically and that will give you sorting by time. When you upload a new strip, put it in the same directory with all the others and the script will know what the latest is.

Using the same mechanism will give you next/previous buttons - the script has all the strip names/dates in an array and should generate a link to the strips that are one either side of the strip currently displayed.

You'll probably want to divide the strips into a directory per year or so, depending on how rapidly you're publishing them; big (>300 entries) directories are slow to access on most filesystems.

For an example of this type of thing, see how I organise some of my photos. See the parameter in the URL? If you have questions, feel free to email me at the address on my website.
posted by polyglot at 10:50 PM on January 21, 2006

Of course, the script knows what day it is by looking at the system clock. If you have strips dated in the future, the script can detect that and ignore them, meaning that they're invisible to the lay user.

I have another similar time-based thing here whereby items are XHTML files named as the dates on which they are to occur; files in the future go in the left column and files in the past go in the right. They move across automatically, of course.
posted by polyglot at 10:55 PM on January 21, 2006

There are a lot of scripts out there. A random selection that Google found for me: Walrus looks pretty simple and easy to setup. CUSP seems pretty big and featureful. Comicpress might be nice if you're already familiar with Wordpress. There are also places that will host your comic for you (Keenspace Comicgenesis for example), that way you don't have to wory too much about technical stuff.
posted by reynaert at 11:58 PM on January 21, 2006

A lot of comics use Movable Type to do their update, such as For Better or For Worse and Chris Bishop's Girl vs. Pig. The comic book legal defense fund is on MT as well. You can set up your posts in advance and all the links are automatically updated.

(Disclaimer: I work for Six Apart, which makes MT.)
posted by anildash at 1:24 AM on January 22, 2006

I adapted my script from NowhereGirl, but it's been changed extensively. The cool thing is that it uses JavaScript to make the pages, and requires no server-side stuff. The bad thing is that it requires JavaScript.

Feel free to use and adapt as you like...

I'm actually thinking about making it more generic and turning it into a php thingie...
posted by jpburns at 9:05 AM on January 22, 2006

I have to agree with Anil--if you don't know how to program this stuff yourself, you'll find it a lot easier to use ordinary blogging software. Just make the main template show only a single entry at a time, and people can travel back and forth from strip to strip easily. Other benefits include easy monthly/weekly/single-strip archives, built-in support for RSS feeds, commenting, etc etc.
posted by bcwinters at 10:43 AM on January 22, 2006

Another second for Movable Type (or one of it's hosted variants, if you want something super-duper easy). I set my Mom up with an MT install for Christmas, and she's been blogging away ever since! =) As for customization, your site might start out looking way more like a blog than you hoped for, but I think any monkeying with the templates to get what you want will be time much better spent than dealing with some wacky PHP / JS code that you find for free on the web.
posted by idontlikewords at 2:19 PM on January 22, 2006