New Plans for the Site

The script for 2214 has been trimmed down a bit, in order to wrap up the story a little earlier than planned. Chapter 6 is the next-to-last chapter now, with Chapter 7 being the finale.
Omnitemporalis, as you may have guessed, has been cancelled due to the fact that there isn't enough time in the schedule to keep this comic going.
Once 2214 has finished, I will begin planning a new web comic (completely different from 2214) and will make it the main comic of the site once it begins.
All of this should happen over the course of the rest of the year. 2214 should end some time around November or December, depending on how the update schedule goes.

Back!

I'm back from Acen. It was fun. Starfyre and I attended various events and walked around a lot.
Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos this year. My digital camera only works for about five minutes before needing new batteries (I got it back in 1998), so it wasn't brought along.
There might be a report on the con later, but for right now, I'ma do some drawing.

Anime Central

I'll be leaving tomorrow (Friday) for Anime Central . I won't be checking my e-mail or anything while I'm up there, and since I don't have page 112 done yet, it won't be posted until after I get back.
On the subject of drawing, I've been doing more work trying to improve the art style of 2214, hopefully to bring it to a more acceptable level. So far, I'd like to think I've made some progress in the past week, with the help of new reference materials and instruction through more books.
I'd say page 112 should get posted... erm... let's shoot for Tuesday next week. Hopefully the art will show signs of improvement.
Until then, I hope to meet some of you at Acen!

Web Standards

Note:
If you hadn't already, please update your RSS link with the RSS link in the top menu. If you already changed it, please disregard this notice. The file won't be moved again.
I wish all browsers would comply with web standards. It has been very difficult to get the site to work correctly in all browsers, and finally a compromise had to be made. The site officially supports version 5 browsers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera), but that compatibility is only in the default 'webcomic' skin.
The 'glass' skin is only fully supported by IE at the moment. Why? Specifically, the dynamic pulldown menus are having issues on the tabbed content pages.
What a pain... and in Opera, the menus don't even appear.
I removed the 'haunted' skin because it was outdated, and removed the 'deluxe' skin because it needed heavy debugging for use with the new system.
I picked up a couple of new books today:
"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards, and "Drawing the Head and Figure" by Jack Hamm. Hopefully adding these to my art instruction book collection will be helpful.
Oh, and I picked up the first volume of the Azumanga Daioh anime yesterday.

Site Upgraded!

UPDATE: Please update your RSS bookmark using the RSS link in the menu. The location was changed.

Well, the long process of re-coding the site from scratch has finally been completed.

Having been a long time since I've last posted, let me fill you in on what I've been working on.

I'm going to wait until the sites are launched before I link anything, but one of my projects was to design and code, from scratch, the Cocoebiz.com web site. I will link it as soon as it goes live. I had some other big projects that I can't name right now, but all of these projects were both welcomed freelance work and very educational.

Having improved at coding a bit, I decided that Nitrocosm.com should get a complete re-make. Even though it doesn't look any different, all of the back-end code has been rebuilt from scratch, the database totally redone, and the skins system upgraded. Since the site is using the same skins for right now, it won't look any different to the user, but after a while some new skins will be developed for it.

Classic.nitrocosm.com has been taken down, since it's been quite a while since the site was upgraded from that system. It was using the old database structure, which I got rid of during the most recent upgrade.

Now... it's good to be back. There's still some work to do on the other projects, and Anime Central is less than a week away, but I plan on finally churning out the next 2214 page and get back into doing some drawing.

Site Upgrade

Ok, I've been gone for quite some time.

Later on, probably tonight or tomorrow, the site may be down for a bit while a major update takes place. During the course of programming for some recent freelance projects, I've revised some code in the site's design.

More than just a revision, however, I soon went on to completely rebuild the site engine from scratch. The entire thing was re-coded, and the database structure was totally overhauled. I won't get into the technical details here, but it offers some major advantages as far as flexibility, security, and speed.

So... if you notice that the site is down within the next day or two, it's because the upgrade is taking place. Outages shouldn't be for more than an hour.

Once the upgrade is complete, I'll fill you in on what I've been doing and what my plans are for the comic.

ISP trouble again

I'm in the process of drawing page... what was it again... 112?

Anywho, my internet connection is all but totally worthless. Yes, again. Time Warner said they have to send another tech out here to paw about on my computer to figure out why my cable modem is getting a 44% packet loss. Yuck.

Since I've gotten a break from the freelance work, I've taken some extra time to get back into practice. Specifically, working on:

1) Line Quality
2) Hands (these are tough)

It pays to read books on proper technique for this stuff. Some day, it'll click ^_^

As for now, it's back to making some real progress on the next update.

Freelancing

Whew! Now then.

I've completed the work on the very large freelance project that has kept me away from the site for weeks. While it was nice to work on this project, it's great to finally be able to get back to work on Nitrocosm.com and of course, 2214.

First, we've got a new feature that some of you might find rather niftily-neat. It's an RSS feed , for those of you who use news readers or other stuff that uses RSS.

Since I started using Mozilla Firefox on a regular basis, the RSS feature in the bookmarks has come in rather handy. My internet connection (Time Warner, bleah!) has been shaky once again, so the bandwidth saved by using RSS to check the headlines has been very helpful.

Ah, yes. Getting back to drawing now. There's a stack of "How to Draw Manga" books sitting here, which I've been re-reading lately. There's lots of great ideas on how to improve technique in those books, and some of them should be implemented in the next update, on page 112.

Speaking of, I'll get cracking on that first thing tomorrow. But right now, time for bed.