Site Upgrade

Last week, as you may have noticed, the site got a bit of a facelift and much content was added.

This version of the site, version 2, was put together with Apple's iWeb application. I did this partly because I wanted to mess around with the software, but mostly because I was bumping up against the limits of my own abilities. That, and I had no time to monkey around with the code.

But now that there is a functional site that has everything on it than I want to be on it (well -- almost everything. More on this later.) I can focus on the next version.

Version 3 will have a different look, but similar organization. My plan is to have the whole thing run off a Content Management System for easy updating. The CMS will form the backbone of future versions. At least, that's the plan.

Quickly on iWeb: if you are looking to throw together a website very, very quickly it is an ideal tool. Like with iMovie, Apple has allowed regular people do what was once the realm of trained professionals. Whether or not this is a good thing has yet to be seen.

As a friend of mine put it, "Isn't iWeb for soccer moms?" More or less.

Lastly, the only thing this site is missing is the stuff I did for the Gargoyle. There are two problems with this.

First, The Gargoyle has the files for everything I worked on. It does not, however, have them in an accessible form. When we sent the issues to the printers, we used PDFs. But they were huge, at print-quality standards. Creating smaller PDFs for downloading has been a goal of the Garg for sometime, but has been hampered by the lack of organization.

Some day, I hope to be able to show off all the issues that I edited. But I don't know when that will be.

In the coming days, some selected material that I wrote for the Garg will be available. Keep an eye out for that.

Writings Added

A major personal success has been the addition of a "Write" section.

Here, readers can view a selection of my written work, which from this point forward will be referred to as my "Collected Works."

The whole writing section is running off WordPress with the amazingly innovative Commentpress theme. Commentpress was demoed to me by Ben from the Institute For The Future of the Book. These guys have done some pretty amazing projects with what they call "Networked Books."

After an awful lot of tinkering, I have it running and would describe the process as "Educational."

The whole point of CommentPress is that it allows commenters to comment in more detailed manner than just a general statement at the end of a post. They can still do that, but they can also comment paragraph by paragraph. This is especially helpful as drafts begin to permeate the collected works -- commentary will surely make those better.

There still is no "About" page, which is unfortunate since this site is rapidly becoming something I'd actually want to show people. Furhtermore, I am annoyed that I can't change the color of grey on the Collected Works (at least not yet). I'm trying to go for a uniform drabness, and I am just not certain that's coming through.
Lastly, this blog still bugs the hell out of me. It's found a purpose: to update readers on the status of the website. But I still hate how it looks.
I've also decided that my personal Blog will be linked here, eventually. Again, I'm annoyed that the colors won't match, but I like how that page looks and so do the readers (I think).

The internet is a tricky thing!

The First Link

The first link has been put up on the main site.
The blog and the home page are now linked -- I guess this is a real site now.

Up next is the creation of an "ABOUT" page. After that, I'll want to re-design the blog page, as I said earlier.

Did You Just Double Post?

Yes, I did.
I certainly did just re-post something from my personal blog here.
Partly, because I am thinking of merging the two together, but mostly because I wanted to see how huge masses of text looked with the current layout.

My opinion is that it is not wide enough. I'll probably monkey with this.

Northlanders

Brian Wood is easily one of the biggest stars in the comic book world right now. His series of short, self-contained comics called Demo made quite an impression and his popularity has exploded with the continuing series DMZ.

Personally, I hadn't had all that much exposure to Wood until DMZ went into trade paperback a few years ago. While I was initially unimpressed, it was Wood's story that drew me in. His characters, his plots were mostly uninteresting, and occasionally laughable. Especially in the most recent "Public Works" story arc (recently collected in trade paperback), Wood has shown such a penchant ham-handed story-telling that it has driven me away from the series. In the end, I couldn't take the irritating mixture of a byronic hero and a bubbling baby, or the Law and Order "ripped from the headlines" plot-lines for more than three books. Perhaps the next trade will redeem DMZ in my eyes, but I digress.

Wood has redeemed himself in my eyes, if only for using Vikings, in his newest continuous series from Vertigo called Northlanders. The story is set in 980 C.E., and follows the dark and violent story of a young Norseman who returns home to find his father dead, and his family's power usurped by his evil uncle. It's all very Shakespearean.

Despite the cast being headed by another brooding, dark-haired man, Northlander holds much more promise than the early DMZ issues did. Sven, the main character, may be dower but he's also capable and has motivation unlike the DMZ's aimless and endlessly naive Matty. This drive seems, at least in the first two installments, to be enough to hold the story together and keep readers interested.

What has impressed me most thus far is how well Northlander represents the period. The big things, like houses, clothing and boats are less movie-Viking and much closer to the real thing. Beyond that, the story is masterfully atmospheric, sometimes with whole panels showing the distant mountains and dark, alienating sea set against grey skies. It doesn't make the Orkney Islands look like a major vacation attraction, but it does capture the quiet majesty, and subtle grimness of Nordic life. The panels look like grittier, dirtier figures from illuminated manuscripts or stained glass. Figures idealized by history, but touched with humanity and reality.

Also, the premise of the story -- a young Viking abroad with the varangians, returning to seek his inheritance from greedy family -- is spot on for period Nordic stories. Even the land-grabbing, similar to the consolidation of power in the Norse world toward the end of the Viking age, seems quite natural.

If I must complain, and I must, I am annoyed by Wood's main character -- but just a bit. While he's more palatable than DMZ's lead, he falls more into the traditional comic book male role. Strong, violent, oppressed, aloof. While these characteristics are certainly natural for a Viking, it's handling seems thoroughly modern. The use of modern-english curses, for instance, just ruins the moment for me, and while I acknowledge that Vikings were probably a surly bunch I am certain that they weren't using words that I know. It's not that I don't think they should be swearing, it's just annoying to see "cursing" passing for being "atmospheric" or "character development."

What might be most exciting, especially for people like me, is not where Northlander is now but where it will be soon. 980 C.E. was the tail end of the Viking Age, and already the world was starting to squeeze them out. By 10000 C.E., Christianity had spread as far as Iceland and the sixty-six years later King Harald would be defeated in England, bringing an end to the fury of the Norseman. A comic series featuring some of the least celebrated and most interesting groups in history, poised on the edge of massive social upheaval is really something to get worked up about.

Personally, and I did say I was biased toward Vikings, I think this is a series that is certainly worth a look. It's very early in the series now, so it could easily go sour, but it has enough going for it to have me signed up -- at least for now.

---

The author wishes you to note that he did not go into an extended discussion of how happy he was to see scorn poles, and other such Norse minutia, and tried to be all "professional."
The Author is also feeling much better, and considers himself no longer sick.

CMS? Wuzzat?

Part of my gig with the Gargoyle requires me to stop being funny and make the occasional executive decision. You see, the mag has been trying to get online -- and I mean really get online -- for the past three years. The problem we face there, and the problem I face with this very site, is that DIY is a pain. Sure you can do it -- you can copy/paste some code, try and remember the HTML they taught you in 7th grade, or search the web for "WebsiteBuilderForIdiots.exe" (Not that it'd help. Damn you, OS X and your wodnerfulness!) -- but the odds are that you have bad taste and that your site will look as flimsy and cobbled together as it is.

So, at the Garg, we hired a guy. And he's doing good work.

Anyway, the Mighigan Daily has recently begun it's search for a CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM or CMS. And I don't blame you for not knowing what that is. In short, it's like the blog management tools you can access through Blogger. That is, if those tools got two degrees from UM's Computer Science Dept., were addicted to speed, and had hugs cars.

With the Daily searching for a CMS, we began to question if this was the answer to at least some of our website woes. After spending over three hours pouring over the websites and documentations for systems like Plone and Drupal, I can confidently say that I have no idea.

Furthermore, I am currently of the opinion that the only way to tell if one of these open-source CMSs are any good is if you start running the things on your site.

So, will I be trying out Plone here?
Quite possibly.

Will it be so atrocious that you will never let anyone know?
Most assuredly.

The Site So Far

Well, I went ahead and bit the bullet yesterday and put the site up. Such as it is.
Since then I've been monkeying with the blog, letting myself getting nit-pickey with the code. Hopefully with good results.

I'll probably juggle around the themes a few more times before I'm finally settled. I think I need to start with something a little less structured so that I can more easily bend it to my will. Of course, I could just start from scratch. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of these blogger templates look damn good. Overused these days, but pretty snazzy none the less.

The job search continues.