This is a test.

Announcing the final release of version 1.5 of stripShow, my WordPress plugin for automation of webcomics.

If you create a webcomic, and you don’t use WordPress, it’s time to get with the 21st century. Blogging software and webcomics are a natural match. Wordpress provides automatic features like RSS, notification of search engines, and easy content management… stripShow takes those features further, adding:

• Conventional comic-navigation links (first comic, previous comic, next comic, latest comic, random comic)
• RSS feeds with the comic image included
• Searchable transcripts that can be added right in the blog, viewed or hidden at the webmaster’s or reader’s option
• A simple and easily-customizable example theme
• A full-featured nested storyline system, including the usual storyline dropdown menu, but also with an easy-to-use management page
• Bulk import of existing comics into WordPress’s blog database
• Support for GIF, JPEG, PNG, and even HTML and Flash files as comics
• Flexibility in where to store your comic files and how to name them, all controlled by a standard WordPress-style admin page
• Of course, since it’s a blog, each comic has its own “rant box” to go with it. Also, you can maintain a conventional blog on the same site, separate from your comic

stripShow is in heavy development, and I’m constantly getting new ideas from people on our forum. New features are constantly being added.

Check out the new version of stripShow, 1.5, at our downloads page, or see it in action at our example site. I think you’ll like it!

I’m pleased to announce the release of the first Release Candidate for stripShow 1.5!

There are a lot of bug fixes in this release, basically anything that’s been discussed in the stripShow forum. In addition, new features include the ability to add searchable transcripts to your comics, and the code has been updated to work with WordPress 2.3!

StripShow 1.5RC1 is available for download here.

This is still a Release Candidate, so caution should be taken… if there are no reports of bugs, this will be the final version which should come out in a few days.

If you have any problems at all, whether it’s an error message or simply problems parsing my horrible documentation, please post a note on the forum so I can know.

If you’re considering upgrading to WordPress 2.3, and you use stripShow, DO NOT DO IT! Apparently, they’ve done away with one of the database tables that stripShow (like a lot of other plugins, apparently) uses. Until I find a way around this, stripShow will NOT work with WordPress 2.3. Please don’t upgrade!

UPDATE: stripShow 1.5 and later are compatible with WordPress 2.3.

If any of you have surfed over to my webcomic, Monkey Law, you may have noticed that the “First,” “Previous,” “Next,” and “Last” buttons are rollovers. I realize, though, that I never really give any instructions for how to make rollovers work in stripShow. One thing you might also wonder is, since stripShow doesn’t assign DHTML items like ID to the navigation buttons, how can you make them into rollovers, since JavaScript has nothing to grab on to?

The answer is I don’t use JavaScript. I use pure CSS.

So here, without further ado, is a tutorial.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, what gives? This site has the WordPress default theme and is horribly ugly!

Yeah, I decided to split the stripShow site into two components — a blog (which you’re reading) and the example of stripShow in action (which you can get to from the links at the left). I figured people who are interested in what stripShow does don’t need to wade through all the stuff I plan to put on this blog. They want to flip through the example “comics,” and make sure that navigation goes the way they want.

This site, by contrast, will be more for announcements of releases, and also tips and tricks for using stripShow. I will, don’t worry, be customizing the theme in the next few days.