Monday, August 26, 2024
Stripper's Guide is Moving!
Those of you with a long memory might remember an announcement back in April 2022 that I was working on a new website for Stripper's Guide. Over two years later that project has finally come to fruition! I have a lot to say about this new website, but if you don't want to read my yammering about it, here's the link, go on over and check it out:
COMICSTRIPHISTORY.COM
For the past 19 years, Stripper's Guide has been hosted on a platform called Blogger, which is run by Google. It's a good platform, but limited in a lot of ways. There were things I wanted to do with the website that needed the flexibility of a more robust platform.That platform is called WordPress, and it pretty much allows for just about anything my li'l heart could desire. The downside is that with that kind of flexibility comes a lot of complexity, and with complexity comes all sorts of weird problems that need to be solved. And that's why this project has been grinding on for so long.
The big stumbling block was that I wanted 19 years worth of posts to come with me to the new site. There are tools for moving blogposts from Blogger to WordPress, but those out-of-the-box tools are basically toys, not designed to deal with nearly 6000 posts and 10,000 images! And they're also not designed to deal with old posts that Blogger stored in various oddball different ways over the years.
Anyway, many, many expensive programmer man-hours later, the new website has every single post and image from the current website. You'll also find all your great comments preserved as well (except for those made in the last three weeks -- sorry). But of course that's not all; the new site offers these new features:
- An extremely robust search capability that allows you to search by post category and month and year. Also, the search is exact -- not fuzzy. In other words, if you search for BLONDIE you won't also get posts that have the word BLONDE. You can also choose the number of posts you see per page, and you can sort the posts in ascending or descending date order, so now you can see a series of posts in the order you would want to read them!
- Ability to add the blog onto your RSS feed, which will soon be supplemented with the ability to sign up for new post emails, so you never miss a post even when you forget to visit. (This feature was supposed to work right now, but last minute bugs intervened and we need to work on it).
- Unadulterated images! Blogger monkeys with the images I upload, dropping their resolution and often shrinking them as well. On the new site you should see the images exactly as I uploaded them. If an image is fuzzy or too small to read, it ain't Blogger's fault anymore, it's mine.
So now I need some help from you folks. I'd really appreciate it if you not only visit the site, but try navigating, look at images, try some searches. If you find anything is amiss, or even just things you think could be done better, please let me know. Consider yourselves my software testers, and try to break that new website!
So assuming the new website works properly, this will be the last post on Blogger. Goodbye Blogger, it was great while it lasted!
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Wish You Were Here, from Rudolph Dirks
The first time I ran one of these Moving Picture cards, which Hearst papers gave away in 1906, I asked readers to explain to me how the movement was supposed to happen, because I failed to get the concept. DBenson explained in great detail how the silly things were supposed to work, and now I get it ... I guess ... but colour me underwhelmed.
Mark Johnson also offered help, suggesting I take a look at one of his Ask The Archivist online columns which addressed this exact subject. Well, maybe that column was in its pristine state back in 2019, but today look at the poor thing! The images are gone, and the text, at least on my browser, is so faint as to be illegible. Hey King Features, get your act together and fix these superb columns by Mark Johnson! They're fading away before our very eyes!
Labels: Wish You Were Here
It is a real shame about my old blog. There's a lot that should be preserved, but perhaps KFS has no more use for it, and it's slowly being wished into the corn field. Or might be that it's still a valuable draw, (They said that while I was doing it, it had the largest following) and if one pays for their "Comics Kingdom" subscription, the pix and words would return.
Just can't find it now, but I had shown in at least one posting, a card from this series that was uncut, with careful instructions around the edges as to where to cut and fold to make the up-and-down action when squeezed. As you can imagine, the action is usually some Hearst hero receiving deserved or not lumps.
