Inheriting a Community

The other day, David Davis, illustrator of Cosmic Dash, came to me asking me if I would be willing to help manage some of the code over at Comic Dish.  Now, you see, Comic Dish is a web comic hosting community, and it also happens to be the host for my web comic, Lakewood.  I told David that I would be more than happy to help out.

It wasn’t until shortly after this conversation that I realized what was actually going on.  Sam, the administrator over at the Comic Dish, essentially dropped the entire site in my lap.  Now, I’m more than happy to take it.  Comic Dish is a good site, and it has a lot of potential.  Unfortunately, Sam, due to his current schedule and other concerns, simply did not feel up to managing the site any longer and needed an out.  Cue yours truly.

Well, because I know that I won’t be able to do much more than simple bug fixing on my own due to time constraints (I have Lakewood, I’m working towards my degree, and I’ve also got a couple of jobs, the main one right now being at Napalm Riot), I decided to put together a programming team.

David Davis will be helping with some of the GUI related issues, such as HTML and CSS templates and the like.  I provide some basic specs of what it will look like, and he’s going to be putting it together.

Jon (Picante) is also going to be helping out as my PHP coding assistant.  He’s a good programmer, and he’s worked on community sites like Comic Dish before, so it should be easy for him to help me recode the core system.

JTorch is also an “Apprentice,” and will be helping out where he can.

The other two that will be helping on an off-and-on basis are Sam (different from the owner) admin of OverCranked, a movie review web site, and Brian, who is a Java coder.

So what is this going to get us?  Firstly, an awesome comic host!  Hopefully, with everything up and running, we should be able to host and supply to people a stable, customizable system that will allow us to create custom web comic sites as good or better than other systems.  Also, it will allow all of us on the team to gain valuable experience… let alone put an extra line on our Resumes.  A shiny “System Administrator of The Comic Dish” sounds good to me!

Anyways, stay tuned, and I should have updates on Comic Dish in the near future!  Also, if you’re a web cartoonist, sign up for an account!  I’m going to need people to test the system!

Cheers!

-Doc

Weekly Comic Dump – March 29th – April 4th

COMIC NEWS

Well, picking a little fun at the predicament that I had this week with the hardware issues here at the Studio, I ended up drawing a few comics dealing with the Sticks updating their computer.  Cowboy goes from Vista to Dos to Windows ‘95.  Talk about upgrades!

Also, this week, I celebrated hitting 600 strips total in the Lakewood universe (Lakewood is a combination of three of my old comic strips, Designation Se7en, Sticks, and Sharky)!  Pretty exciting!  Also, Lakewood hit 50 strips this week!

If you would like to read my comics on a daily basis, please feel free to read it over at ComicDish on The Official Lakewood Web Site.

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In Technical details, I’d like to mention what software and materials were used for each strip.

46 – Photoshop Elements 5
47, 48, 50, 51, 52 – Adobe Illustrator CS4
49 – Sharpie Markers

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Cheers!

-Doc

The System is Down…

Well, I had a most interesting predicament the other day.  As I was finishing up a rather large program that I was writing in C (a basic database engine), I turned to work on a couple of things, and then, when I turned back to my computer, something stunning happened.

“CHIC-BHSHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWwwwwwwwwwwwwwww…….”

The system itself shut down, with a rather nasty sound, the likes of which I have tried to exemplify above.

Anyways, my one reaction was “Oh.  That can’t be good.”

After a bit, I made an attempt to reboot the machine.  It had hardly gotten beyond the BIOS screen when it stated rather simply “Hard Drive Failure.”

That’s odd, I thought, as I looked at the ominous grey-on-black command prompt.  I didn’t hear the hard drive crash or anything…

So then it was time to fix and rebuild.  Luckily, I run Linux on several of my machines, so I used a rescue disk on my big ol’ Windows box.  Remarkably, I was able to mount half of the hard drives.  I did a network backup, but since I have about a half terabyte of information on the disk, it took about a day over the non-gigabit network.

Then I went to the Great and Abominable Store (Best Buy) in order to purchase a new .5 TB hard drive.  I got in and out for only a few bucks more than NewEgg’s offerings on the same drive, so I was happy.  I came home, threw into the machine, and then I installed Windows fresh, copying original files.

The only problem I’ve run into on my system rebuild, CS4 would not work.  Photoshop crashes every time I make an attempt to open an image.  I have yet to be able to diagnose the reason.  Luckily, this morning I realized that I had not installed it on my 64-bit machine, so I installed it, and it’s running beautifully.

Anyways, here we go… rebooting life again.

And Lakewood has been running steadily for over a month!  YES!

Cheers!

-Doc