jeffaBlog

This weekend I finally launched my latest website: Galactic Beacon.

Galactic Beacon is the name of a science fiction and fantasy anthology that I’ll be publishing in eBook format within a couple of weeks.

The site is also home to a comic that will be included in the anthology, that is designed to look good on an eReader.

The comic is free on the website, but the anthology on eReader will be sold via various sources (Kindle store for instance). I’m also working on an app for the Palm WebOS for reading the book.

I will also sell various formats of the book directly from the site (ePub, PDF, etc.) for eReaders that allow you to download your own files.

Readers of this blog might be interested in knowing that this is an instance of my new jeffaBlogger comic/blog engine that uses ASP.Net MVC.

I hope everyone will take a look and let me know what you think.

My last post was the one page comic of Gun Baby On The Moon Hunting Dinosaurs.

Evidently that simple, yet haunting story inspired quite a few comments. I am certain that none of them were spam, but rather sincere comments on the story.

Here are a sampling of the comments that I deleted, but which were worthy of elevation from mere comments to full-blown post status.

Remember: these are refering to the non-sensical Gun Baby On The Moon Hunting Dinosaurs comic...

"Well, the post is in reality the best on this worthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to see your upcoming updates. Just saying tnx will not just be sufficient, for the fantasti c lucidity in your writing. I will instantly grab your feeds to stay abreast of any updates. Authentic work and much success in your business dealings! Have a nice day, Tamela."

Tnx to you too, Tamela! I'm really encouraged that you concur with my conclusions. About Gun Baby. On The Moon. Hunting Dinosaurs.

"Thank I am pretty sure this will solve all my problems."

Man, I sure hate to think what your problems were if this comic will solve all of them. 

"You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case."

This is SO true! I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to hearing more about pointing and leading.

"I am really moved by the way that you write, and the subject is good. And considering one of the selling of points of the first Kindle was “Includes free wireless access to the planet’s most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia—Wikipedia.org.” I don’t think there are any TOS issues with visiting the site. Some of the other applications may cross the line, though."

I'll admit that writing Gun Baby On The Moon Hunting Dinosaurs was an emotionally draining experience for me. I wept for ten days. Then I laughed for ten days. Then I tried to figure out what any of this had to with the Kindle for ten days.

 Keep those highly relavent comments coming, folks!

It’s been a looong time coming, but the first alpha site using jeffablogger is now live.

I’ve converted my webcomic, Funzietown, to use my MVC based jeffablogger instead of the un-named web-forms based blog/comic engine I made back in ‘08.

The webcomic is aimed at kids, so I’ve turned off a bunch of the features of jeffablogger. You can’t register, for instance, because if you keep contact info on a site that is marketed at children you have to verify ages. That sounds like a hassle and potential lawsuit to me, so I disabled registering.

The goal for the user experience for a reader is to look and work like every other blog or comic you’ve ever read.

The goal for the user experience for admins, editors, writers, and artists is to be as smooth and easy as possible. Of course you can’t see those bits yet on the beta site.

I have a few more features to add before declaring beta status (feature complete for this release). OK, I have a fair number of features I want to add, but I’ll try to constrain myself to what I can finish within the next month or so.

Once I reach beta status, I will add unit tests and concentrate on bug fixes until ready to release as open source. Once tests are in place and I feel like my code is pretty I’ll release the project to Codeplex.

As part of beta testing I’ll convert our user group site GGMUG.com and debut a science fiction site that I’ve been planning. That will give me three sites using the engine, so I should get pretty good feedback on bugs.

Here’s my idea of the most awesome possible outcome of Disney buying Marvel:

This is my homage to both companies. They of course own all their copyrights, trademarks, etc. If they want to use my idea for a line of comic books, they can sign me up as the first subscriber.

I did this completely with a brush instead of my usual pen/nib. I need a smaller brush so it meant REALLY having to be steady to do the fine strokes. The shading on the shield was especially difficult with the brush.

Most people who care about this issue seem to be upset that Disney is buying Marvel. I really loved the Disney comics when I was growing up. They tended to have far deeper stories than the cartoons.

I had a lot of fun doing this one. When I heard Disney was buying Marvel I immediately began thinking of which Disney character would be good in which Marvel role. Donald is obvious since his anger management issues rival the Hulk's any way.

Mickey as Captain America seemed obvious as well. That cast them as the Avengers right there, so the next two who had to be there were Thor and Iron Man. Goofy's taller than the rest of the characters and I thought with the appropriately "goofy" equipment he'd work out.

Ten points to anyone who knows who is under that Iron Man armor! Should be obvious to anyone who read the Disney comics, pretty obscure to everyone else. He did appear in the Duck Tales show I hear (but that was after I had stopped watching cartoons because I was too old, but before I was old enough to have kids and start watching them again!).

Guess what? I ticked off Facebook by posting links to this drawing on the various Disney related groups, and they blocked me! I guess they figured anyone who posts links must be selling something. If anyone came here under the assumption I would be selling something, then I'll try to dig up something around the house to sell. I have a bunch of really old broken computers! Um, how about a 10 MB hardrive for one of the original crop of Macintoshes? Pretty rocks?

Did a huge amount of work this weekend, but not on jeffaBlogger. I’m working on a side project that will USE jeffaBlogger, and I needed to get it 80% finished before jumping back on jeffaBlogger itself. I’m about 75% now, so hopefully by this weekend I’ll be back to MVC. This was WPF, so it was fun too.

This side deallie is to help my wife get her website up and running. Can’t leak any secrets yet, but hopefully within about two weeks that site will be live and running as the first jeffaBlogger site.

‘Scuse me, while I curl into a fetal position for a few minutes while thinking about the amount of work I have left…

One or maybe two more weekends of working somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hours over the course of the weekend will hopefully get me to the point of going live with the first site. jeffaBlogger will be nowhere near finished, but far enough along to provide the blog and other specific functions (*cough*) that the first site will need to get started.

The second site will be coming shortly after that (hopefully). It, too, is secret so I can’t talk about it. This one is going to be mine and give me an outlet for some other stuff I like doing (including but not limited to comics). Hopefully I can get it up and running within a month. I suck at keeping secrets, so I REALLY hope I can get it going soon.

The unfortunate victim here is poor little Funzietown. I haven’t had time to do any cartooning. That site as well will be replaced by the all powerful jeffaBlogger. I do have the current storyline finished in rough pencil form and the beginning of the next one. It takes a fair amount of time to translate a pencil rough to an inked and scanned comic. So sadly, I haven’t even been making the weekly schedule.

If anyone has bottled time (Croce brand preferably), I could sure use some. A few dozen extra hours each week would be nice.

This comic was inspired by a blog post I read by Geek Gamer Girl.

Seriously, Amazon, I would be more than happy to accept a Kindle DX in exchange for this blantant advertisement for your product. Nah, I didn't think so.

Trying to get back in the groove of thinking about this project.

There are lots of options for hosting a webcomic or blog. Only an idiot would try to write something from scratch.

Luckily, I AM an idiot.

To cut myself a BIT of slack for pulling a Don Quixote, I DO want to learn MVC. That is as close to a valid reason for doing this as you are going to get.

To compete with the existing software (which in some cases has a head start of several YEARS and multiple developers) I will have to replicate lots of features and add new ones.

I doubt anyone but me will ever use the software, but I still want to make it as full featured and competitive as possible.

The first requirement is that it absolutely, positively has to be designed from the ground up to handle an unlimited number of comics or blogs.

The next requirement is that it has to be as close to fully self-service as possible. I want my hypothetical customers to be able to fully manage their own comic or blog from look and feel to backups.

Next it has to hit all the expected standards and de-facto standards such as RSS/Atom syndication and working with various blogging tools such as Microsoft's Live Writer. Part of my plan is to write an extension for Live Writer to better handle comics.

Towards these goals I've started thinking about architecture. I've spent a ton of time working with big deal databases such as Oracle and SQL Server over the years and really love the power they bring to the techno-party, but they do come at a cost for a project that plans to live on the web in a hosted environment.

My current line of thinking is that it would make more sense in this project to persist the data in XML files. The ratio of reads to writes and quantity of data should be such that this is a workable solution. Basically each comic or blog gets its own XML file. That makes it a non-issue to have the creators do their own backups. They hit backup, and I hand them back a copy of their XML files(s) plus their media files.

I've worked a good bit with Linq To SQL, but this is my first foray into Linq to XML. One of the really beautiful things about Linq is that it standardizes the query language so that you can work with many different collection types with one SQL like language. This includes SQL Server, XML and plain old objects. Very cool.

I'm planning to do some experimentation with Linq To SQL as soon as I get Visual Studio re-installed. I've been using the beta version of Windows 7 for a few months and the day of reckoning has come. The beta times out at the end of the month, so I decided this weekend to install the release candidate. That means re-installing every app.

My thinking is that the data access layer will consist of objects that read/write XML via Linq. I'll have to learn more about MVC to see whether or not I'll need to implement my own caching, but it isn't that big of a deal either way. Since the model is tons 'o readers and one updater per comic or blog, it should be easy to keep one object in memory that is shared among all readers. I'll share more of my thinking on this subject as I learn more.

I’m officially starting a project to write software for hosting webcomics using Microsoft’s MVC (Model View Controller) framework for Asp.Net.

Of course there are two main reasons for doing this:

1. Learn MVC and use it on a real project
2. Profit (well, hopefully generate revenue by hosting other people’s webcomics)

Don’t know if numero dos up there will ever pan out, but I can’t go wrong with number one unless I actually knock something else out of my head by learning MVC.

I’m only just starting to dig in to MVC but so far I like it. It is Microsoft’s answer to things like Ruby On Rails.

Kind of begs the question why I don’t just use Ruby On Rails, doesn’t it? Well my reasoning is that I can use C# and .Net for MVC (or Web Forms) and also use it for Silverlight (I want to make casual games too…). I also plan to dig-in to XNA for XBox 360 and Windows games as well. Hmm. Guess I’d better work on the time dilation device first…

Been a very long time since I posted anything here.

The last post was about the first Funzietown comic, and now I'm up to number 44.

Haven't made any money with the comic, but I really enjoy doing it.

There is something about working with India ink and a pen (sometimes brush) that is very soothing.

I've been working as a programmer now for a long time, and I realize that I was really missing the purely creative act of writing. Programming is creative as well, but on the other side of the brain. When I take those left brain/right brain tests I always come out just about completely balanced between the two. I find I need activities that satisfy both sides in order to be really happy. Never thought I'd be drawing, but here I am. Granted I don't draw well, but I am improving and it is very satisfying.

Never fear technical readers! I have three long technical posts in the works. We have a GGMUG meeting next week and only one other person has signed up to speak. These are 20 minutes sessions, so I plan to be prepared to three sessions myself. After the meeting I'll convert those talks into blog posts.