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