New Site! Same Old Puck!

You might notice things look a little different around here. It’s not your mind playing tricks. And while some of you may want to revolt, wondering why on Earth I changed the design, an explanation is in order.

I designed this site back in 2013, after publishing the comic on DeviantArt and Smackjeeves for a few years. I wanted to strike out on my own and get a site that was my own. Considering the fact that Smackjeeves went bust a few years later, that urge was probably a wise one.

This site was built on WordPress (as many independent sites are) but the snag was this: WordPress was not designed for comics. It’s a blogging architecture that is highly customizable with plugins. This means that you need a special plugin with extra coding to handle a webcomic. At the time I started, the standard plugin was one called ComicPress.
There was also its new cool successor, Comic Easel. I built the site using Comic Easel and was, quite frankly, pleased as punch with myself. The site worked. All was well.

But then a problem arose. The Comic Easel plugin was the creation of some dude who maintained it on his own, and (as sometimes happens with these things) he abandoned it. So now most of the independent websites in the world were built on orphanware. This wasn’t too bad, as the sites still functioned. Except…

A few years later, my web hosting company upgraded my PHP to the latest version. (PHP is a programming language upon which most sites are built.) And after that update occurred, my site broke. Like, the main page wouldn’t even load. Because Comic Easel was old and no one was taking care of it, it was no longer compatible with the latest PHP. This was a huge problem. I reverted immediately to the old PHP. Then a while later, my web host decided that they would charge clients extra for the privilege of operating a site on outdated PHP. So now my site was out of date, and I was losing money.

Then, a few months ago, it got worse. WordPress released a statement saying that the site architecture would no longer support older versions of PHP. So the plugin that my entire site was built on wouldn’t work with new PHP, and the base architecture wouldn’t work with the old one. I was up sh@# creek without a paddle.

I had been quietly losing my mind the past while, trying to figure out what to do. Then I saw another webcomic creator mention that he had migrated his Comic Easel sites to a plugin named Toocheke, and my eye went wide. Someone, some genius, had come up with a new plugin, based on new architecture, that could import all the comics previously posted in Comic Easel! I was saved!

Well, sorta. See, doing this conversion would require that I fully adapt the site’s design over to a new theme, and figure out the layout, and just the thought of it was nearly giving me panic attacks. But then I reached out to Brian, the guy who designed Toocheke, and I asked him if I could hire his brilliant mind to make this work. He agreed. So Brian spent the past while designing a custom theme with the goal of basically emulating the old site’s layout, but making it work with Toocheke. He then managed the migration (ensuring I didn’t mess it up), and the result is the new, spiffy site you see before you.

Brian’s expert work meant that the site experienced no real downtime, and the site is back in working order. I’m eternally grateful for his help.

Why do I tell you this? Well, it is mainly to clarify that the changes made to the site were wholly necessary and the end result is the best possible outcome. It was either this or shutter the site entirely. Or design a brand new site, from scratch. One of the things I desperately wanted to do was to preserve the comments on all the previous comics. There are about 60,000 comments on this site – a record of the community, as it were – and I was loath to lose that.

The old site is dead. The new site is here. And the new site ensures that this website will continue into the future. Thanks for continuing to read.