jeffaBlog

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lots happening in Funzietown. I finished the first webcomic this weekend and posted it.

It is B & W at the moment, but I plan to "colorize" it later. I think I'll offer both versions. I like B & W, but so far every kid I show it to asks when I plan to add the color...

I'm pretty happy with the results. It is the first thing I have ever done like this. The art isn't great, but it is far better than I thought I could do. Basically at this point I believe that with practice I can get better.

My plans for the site are beginning to gel as well. I have a cast of characters now and lots of ideas for how to use them. What was initially a game site is rapidly becoming a learning site that contains webcomics, chapter-books, worksheets and games.

Thanks to Amazon's CreateSpace, I plan to collect the webcomics into actual books that I can sell via the site or directly from Amazon. Same goes for the chapter-books. I'm not sure if it is cost effective to publish workbooks, because there are minimum costs for each book, and I'm not sure I can hit a price point someone would want to pay for a workbook.

The other revenue stream I'm trying is Google's Adsense. Man, what a mixed bag! For anyone who doesn't know how it works, here's a quick summary. You place code on your webpages and Google reads all the words on the page and determines what ads to display. To my shock and horror, I found that if you use the word "comics" on a page you get some ads that are far from kid-friendly. One of my son's friends brought this to my attention. You see, each viewer may see different ads, so the publisher may never know what was shown to a given visitor. Yikes!

Google has a new system that allows you to preview ads before they run, more or less. You have 24 hours to reject an ad. If you don't, it will go through. Down side is this kind of makes me a paranoid, Google-checker. Upside, is I can hopefully stop anything really offensive from making it through. Not sure how well it works. So far it hasn't shown me anything that needs approval. Not sure why. I'm also trying to use the code they gave that tells their system to ignore certain sections of your page. Hopefully I can isolate the words that generate such interesting ads... Unfortunately it can take several days for those changes to filter through their system...

Working on a new website: funzietown.com.

"What is it?" you say.

Well, for now it is a lame website whose goal is to be an educational game site. So far I've created one math practice game called Save The Animals! Word of warning, I'm neither an artist nor a musician. My hope is that I can earn enough via the Google adsense ads to contract out some art and music. So if you visit the site and you want to see better graphics and hear better sounds, don't forget to click the crap out of the ads. Think of each click as a few cents dropped into my hat.

I began playing around with Silverlight for games after Keith Rome gave a talk about it to our user group, GGMUG.com.

I've wanted to create a math game that appeals to girls for a while. I worked closely with my focus group (my daughter) and arrived at a game themed around saving animals. After a few tries, this is what I came up with.

I plan to do a more in depth blog post about the internals later, but in the cool part is that I'm using Linq to objects as an embedded database.

When I'm finished the student's results will feed back to the server and be stored in a database where parents/teachers/tutors can review their progress. For now you get a text box with a list of the ones you missed that you can copy and past into notepad, etc.

If you get a chance to try it out, let me know what you think. Except for the graphics and sound. I KNOW about those already... :-)