SailorsFreedom

This page is very much a continuation of the last update. They are really meant to be displayed as a spread in a book, but I could not figure out how to do that gracefully on the web page. Of course the rules of story telling demand that Tam’s estimate of their chances of getting caught will be completely wrong. I am sure I am not giving anything away when I say that.

Someone commented to me that among the changes to the site are the much longer and more complete comments below each comic, like the one your reading. It’s all the fault of Word Press, ComicPress, and Comic Easel. In particular, when I am posting I now have a lot more tools than I did on my little home made form. I have formatting tools, I have a nice large high contrast writing area. I have spell check, and even some grammar tools (yay!). Almost more important than any of that, WordPress also saves a draft of what I am typing every minute or so. This is critical because it was very common with my little home made form that I would write some long description and then it would all get lost due to some problem during the update process, and on the re-try rather than re-create everything I had before I would write the functional equivalent of ‘meh’. That happened enough times that it would discourage me from even trying to write something of consequence. Moving to WordPress would probably have been worth it for that alone.

But wait! There’s more! Now that I am using these tools, I found that I can use my programming ability to do even more customization than I could before. A good example is the like button that is on this post, and every other post. That wasn’t available in any of the Word Press tools that I found, so I wrote it into a function in a child theme and was  able to add it with a slick little snippet that Frumph gave me. Critically I was able to have it show up on every single post, and link to the actual post not to the page the post happened to be on, and I did it with about a grand total of 10 or 12 lines of code.

Now how much would you pay!

I couldn’t have done all that as simply on my old site. Sure it took me hours to figure out where to put that code in the huge  Castle Gormenghast that is the structure of WordPress, its Themes, and its plugins, but it would have almost certainly taken me longer to go ahead and program the feature from scratch. Moving to WordPress has definitely put me ahead of the game.

And there we go, five hundred more works (give or take) most of which I would not have written unless I had moved. Ok, its only four hundred and eighty-eight.