Site fix

This doesn't have a lot to do with the dead-ish status of the Winger comic strip, but the Winger site has been fixed.

Specifically, I've finally taken the bull by the horns and created my own comics/story archive engine. I had been using ComicGallery, but found out from our incoming Keenspot tech guru that there was a potential danger in the way it loops directories.

Part of that danger is because that kind of gallery is *too* dynamic--it basically builds the archive on the fly every time a reader accesses it. The archive pages don't actually exist, so a loop routine reads the files in the comic directory with every visit.

I had tried to combat the more general problem of slow performance with a caching script. However, I found that caching dynamic pages created new problems--I would often get emails about problems in the archive that didn't exist by the time I went and checked, myself. Apparently, the caching script was caching random errors in the archive script.

So instead of just tweaking ComicGallery to do tricks, I used ComicGallery as a springboard to create something quite different. What I have now is essentially a PHP variation of the Keenspot system. Instead of creating the archive on the fly, the PHP script is invoked in order to create folders of static archive pages.

But since this is *mine*, I can include things that have long been on my comics archive "wish list". For one thing, it can create unlimited galleries. Instead of Keenspot's more brittle configuration, which assumes that you will only ever want one comics/ directory that will always feed pages to one d/ directory, mine assumes that you will want endless comics directories. A one-time add of a small number of variables added to a process list allows a one-click update to several archives at a time.

Each archive can be used as the featured update on a homepage with a line of code. That is, if you have two comics on one site, you can feature one comic that you're updating one week, and another the next week.

The date-based update limitation is removed: under Keenspot's system, you can post ten comics with the same date in the filename, and they will all load on the same page! In this new archive, you can post ten comics a day, each with a unique archive page.

The title of the pages--along with an index list--include the full filename, so descriptive text along with the date becomes more useful.

The new archive switches easily between graphic and text updates. If the archive finds a text file, it assumes that it's an update, and moves the content into the page, in line with the graphic updates. The archive script adds break tags, so the text files don't require HTML formatting.

This also means that I can use the same system as a no-frills blog.

I still have a list of things to do. I need to build in some kind of RSS generator. Sometimes you want to include text with a graphic, and my plan is to make to make these files use a different extension or something, so that they can be visually picked out, when browsing your own directory, as a standard text file, or as an include/attachment to another file.

Most importantly, I still need to come up with some kind of automatic updating scheme. That's one thing AutoKeen has that most other systems lack.

So if you happen to look at the revised site, let me know what you think of the comic archive for actual use. I'm still worrying over the configuration of the separate archive homepages...the idea is to include the most recent update, and a complete index to all the comics. But I think the way I'm doing it right now might be too confusing. So I would definitely appreciate feedback.