Max Riffner: Golden Boy

Oct 16, 04:39 PM · New Site

Holy cow, that took longer than I thought. Welcome to the newly-redesigned site! I had been wanting to do this for some time, patiently waiting for Unbound Comics to announce the books were for sale before attempting this conversion.

On the surface, everything is a bit more… rough. I wanted to really capture the look of an old, weathered poster. I think I completed that concept well. The other site was too clean, and too yellow. I also wanted to get rid of the patterned background. It just didn’t really fit. I had my own techniques of achieving a “worn” look, but these tutorials from Cameron Moll really sped the process up.

Now for under the hood: this site had started out as a blog/production journal. Since I had finished the books months ago, the blog portion has lay dormant for the most part. I decided to get away from the sole “blog” site concept. I had been using the almighty Blosxom as my blog tool, and having it dynamically produce static HTML and RSS feeds locally, which I would then FTP up to the site. Blosxom is great if you are a master geek in Perl and like to tinker. I know nothing of Perl, and found it becoming harder and harder to make it do what I wanted (commenting on posts, post titles in title tag, galleries, etc.). However, Blosxom out-of-the-box is great, especially for someone like me who wanted to dip their toes into blogging.

The decision was made to go with Textpattern, which I have been using on my blog Parlor since the beginning of this summer. Textpattern can easily be transformed from blogging software to a lightweight content management system quickly. It has perfectly been able to meet my expectations for sectioning out the site, particularly on the front page with its excerpted entries/sections. I have also employed some cool plug-ins, for example in the Read section, so you are able to page through the entire story without every having to leave the page. Additionally, I can receive feedback from readers who enjoy it by adding the commenting ability native in Textpattern.

As if that was not enough, I have found that my Parlor blog pages are indexed amazingly well in Google, where as my Blosxom produced pages were not (probably stemming from not having a unique title tag). All of these features really sealed the deal for me.

There are still some issues from the conversion (old URL structures and mismatched CSS and layout from posts are two problems that I’m still addressing), but I’ve been so excited to launch this all week that I figured, why not?

So, come on in! Explore with your heart’s content, and let me know what you think!