What Does it Take to Do a Page on CSR?
Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2014 3:32 am
O.K., this is not intended as an “everybody feel sorry for Web-Ed because he works so hard” sympathy piece, but I do want readers to understand what goes into the weekly production of one of more updates per week here. Of course the amount of effort varies depending on the source material. Most of Doctor Cylon’s stuff, for example, is fairly easy to do because the finished art itself is at my fingertips, although I do usually see if I can try to locate the original art he started with. The only thing remaining is the actual page coding. Let’s take a look at a more difficult case - what it takes to bring forth a new (i.e. hitherto unknown in the spanko community) comic-book spanking.
Step 1 – Find the spanking! While these occasionally turn up during routine internet searches, usually they’re not that easy. Sometimes tiny clues in old catalogues or even critical articles lead us to suspect there might be a spanking in a comic book, in which case we usually have to find and purchase a hard copy of the book. In this case, we turned up a fine spanking in the romance comic Lovers’ Lane #29 by going over a digital scan of the book page by page, allowing only two seconds per page. At the present time, we check 3000 – 7000 pages per month this way, depending on the availability of new scans and how much time we have.
Step 2 – Fix the Scans. This involves resizing the full pages, cropping the spanking panel since it will be presented separately on the finished page, and creating a thumbnail image of the spanking panel for the index page of Comics Gallery 2 (it’s necessary to use smaller-size images here so that the index page will load in a reasonable amount of time). I use ACDSee most of the time for these operations.
Step 3 – Do the Background Research. Sometimes the scans themselves contain information, as here where the artist signed his work. Sometimes the collector provides his own notes as to who he believes drew a particular story (JVJ often does so). Other times I may turn to a standard reference such as The Grand Comics Data Base, Steranko’s History of Comics, etc. Finally, I may analyze the art myself, although thankfully I’ve only had to rely on doing so a handful of times. Even with all that, readers will notice that sometimes we just don’t know who drew something, and the writers are even harder to identify.
Step 4 – Code the New Page. This includes the actual writing (composition) which takes place at the same time the HTML code is being written. I don’t use modern web page creation tools because I hate machine-generated code (it’s ugly and hard to maintain); instead, I write HTML the old-fashioned way, with an improved text-editor called Arachnophilia. The length of time it takes to create a new page (based on my existing templates) varies from about 15 minutes in simple cases to several hours if there are many images or lots of historical background to write about.
Step 5 – Add the Thumbnail Image to the Gallery Index. This is easy but important – it only takes a few minutes, unless I’m having trouble deciding whether to build a new row or not. I am rather fussy about trying to keep like things together where possible.
Step 6 – Update the Home Page. This involves adding the links to the current week’s updates, manually revising the “Last Updated” date, and a few other changes.
Step 7 – Upload the Files Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). This is a fairly simply process if you have the appropriate software. The only difficulties are remembering to include all the files a particular page needs, including any picture files, and uploading them to the right directory on CSR’s web server.
Step 8 – Don’t Forget to Test! The slightest error, such as a typo in the name of a picture file, will cause the picture not to appear on the page. A typo in the page name means the entire page will fail to show up. Another kind of error occurs if you FTP the files to the wrong location: for example, loading a comic spanking into the Humor Page directory will not put the page into the Humor Gallery, it will simply disappear altogether. Small errors are, alas, rather common. Recode, reload, and re-test!
Repeat every week for 520 weeks, and here we are
!
Step 1 – Find the spanking! While these occasionally turn up during routine internet searches, usually they’re not that easy. Sometimes tiny clues in old catalogues or even critical articles lead us to suspect there might be a spanking in a comic book, in which case we usually have to find and purchase a hard copy of the book. In this case, we turned up a fine spanking in the romance comic Lovers’ Lane #29 by going over a digital scan of the book page by page, allowing only two seconds per page. At the present time, we check 3000 – 7000 pages per month this way, depending on the availability of new scans and how much time we have.
Step 2 – Fix the Scans. This involves resizing the full pages, cropping the spanking panel since it will be presented separately on the finished page, and creating a thumbnail image of the spanking panel for the index page of Comics Gallery 2 (it’s necessary to use smaller-size images here so that the index page will load in a reasonable amount of time). I use ACDSee most of the time for these operations.
Step 3 – Do the Background Research. Sometimes the scans themselves contain information, as here where the artist signed his work. Sometimes the collector provides his own notes as to who he believes drew a particular story (JVJ often does so). Other times I may turn to a standard reference such as The Grand Comics Data Base, Steranko’s History of Comics, etc. Finally, I may analyze the art myself, although thankfully I’ve only had to rely on doing so a handful of times. Even with all that, readers will notice that sometimes we just don’t know who drew something, and the writers are even harder to identify.
Step 4 – Code the New Page. This includes the actual writing (composition) which takes place at the same time the HTML code is being written. I don’t use modern web page creation tools because I hate machine-generated code (it’s ugly and hard to maintain); instead, I write HTML the old-fashioned way, with an improved text-editor called Arachnophilia. The length of time it takes to create a new page (based on my existing templates) varies from about 15 minutes in simple cases to several hours if there are many images or lots of historical background to write about.
Step 5 – Add the Thumbnail Image to the Gallery Index. This is easy but important – it only takes a few minutes, unless I’m having trouble deciding whether to build a new row or not. I am rather fussy about trying to keep like things together where possible.
Step 6 – Update the Home Page. This involves adding the links to the current week’s updates, manually revising the “Last Updated” date, and a few other changes.
Step 7 – Upload the Files Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). This is a fairly simply process if you have the appropriate software. The only difficulties are remembering to include all the files a particular page needs, including any picture files, and uploading them to the right directory on CSR’s web server.
Step 8 – Don’t Forget to Test! The slightest error, such as a typo in the name of a picture file, will cause the picture not to appear on the page. A typo in the page name means the entire page will fail to show up. Another kind of error occurs if you FTP the files to the wrong location: for example, loading a comic spanking into the Humor Page directory will not put the page into the Humor Gallery, it will simply disappear altogether. Small errors are, alas, rather common. Recode, reload, and re-test!
Repeat every week for 520 weeks, and here we are
!
