Beyond going live
Going live is all good and well, but that’s when the real work starts. Especially so with a project like GASP Comic, which was released during the development stage to ensure the release was still in 2008. That’s not to say it was released on buggy software, just with vastly limited features. When it went live, GASP Comic had nothing more than an index page (to be manually edited), a comic page (with First, Previous, Next and Last links functioning/disabled properly), and a just-functioning admin section.
Naturally, at first most of the development time goes towards creating more comics, and as we speak there’s been 12 published with 8 more waiting, for a total of 20 comics added (and, for your information, only 20 created so I’m not holding any back locally). There have been further tweaks to the index and comic pages, as well as some news and information added to the index page. What’s more, I’ve created a fully functional (albeit unoptimized) archive page listing comics (published and waiting, with dates and times of release) per 20. Having only 20 now you might think a few errors will crop up, but I assure you testing has been profuse. Bugs always creep up, but the risk was kept to a minimum.
There you have it, another status report. I’m desperately worried about viewer opinions, so I think tonight I’ll start work on a (custom) guestbook type comment system. No registration, just fill in a name, your comment, and hit submit. It’s very vulnerable to cheating (someone could use your name since you can’t register it), but it should do for now. I’ve also planned for the system to automatically add a comment when it publishes a comic, although that could be hard, but we’ll see. Here’s hoping the system will at least be free of spambots.
