Friday, January 06, 2006

Digging Frank's Infrastucture

Ok, I had a little dig at Frank's lack of blog posting yesterday and, in his notes for this weeks funny cartoon, he took me up on it. Well, Frank, if this is an argument that requires me to become so sad as to think of an equivalent action to taking the time to count the number of posts we both did in the run up to Christmas, then this is an argument I can't be bothered winning. Take the rest of the year off boyo. Do something productive. Count your leghairs or something. You've earned it.

Frank's leghairs aside, I was scooting about the place when I stumbled on this post about the importance of infrastructure to the success of a webcomic. It's something we, as in Frank, spend alot of time on getting right. So it was interesting to see that the only cast iron rule in the writers opinion is that you need to have a next and previous navigation. As anyone who comes to this site often enough to read this guff knows, we don't. So I thought about it and had a look at the ComicPress Theme for Wordpress - as we're likely to swap over to Wordpress as soon as Frank has recovered from his manic pre-Christmas activities. It looks workable and seems to be a fairly flexible theme but I'm quite fond of having the four funny cartoons on the one page. Maybe on the homepage we could have previous and next buttons, I don't know. Certainly bloggers or frequent blog readers are, likely as not, very comfortable with our navigation. Quite a few even view them in RSS readers anyway and are therefore pretty oblivious to the issue (if it is even an issue). But, do webcomic fans mitigate against us because of our navigation? It's entirely possible. We do seem to make more friends in the blog arena than we do in the webcomic world. Should we change our way of thinking to yield to the needs of a potential webcomic audience? Maybe. Should we try find some balance that respects our current audience, whilst making ourselves more attractive to the webcomic crowd? Possibly but you'll have to ask Frank about that because I'm way too bitter and begrudging to be bothered kowtowing to anyone's needs. As you might have guessed, I started this post with great intentions but now I'm bored of it. Well, there you go - your opinions on the matter will probably be valued but I wouldn't go betting your house on it.

I still really want to do a range of Valentines Day cards but that probably goes some way to explain why I'm single.