I read someplace that you should make rules for yourself when working on your own project like a graphic novel. One of my rules is to have a maximum of 4 panels per page unless it's the same camera angle repeated over and over. This repeated frame technique is pretty much inspired completely from working in the world of animation and storyboards for the last decade. Sometimes it's fun to explore a locked down sequence of frames to show the movements and visually explain how things happen over a period of time.

I guess my decisions here are mainly to show Victuals struggle to leave the comfort of the lighthouse to get back to the water. I'm hoping that my audience will wonder why he left the lighthouse as well as notice the first words coming from his mouth. Cat's talk?

Oh yeah, and I'm not using Comic Sans anymore.

Another thing I have been toying with is the idea of switching from Google's blogging service to WordPress.org.  A few things have come up swaying me to go this route.

Here is a list of my reasons, so far, for switching from Blogger to WordPress.
 

• WordPress looks much more professional.
• Since it's open-source it has more options for how to set it up. 
• Once it's set up right, it's amazing what you can do with it and it's easy.
• reMINDblog.com will be an actual domain instead of a forwarded domain name.
• All the content will be on my server and controlled by me.
• I can use ComicPress to easily display my pages in an orderly fashion.
• I can have a menu at the top with About, Contact, Links, Tutorials, Etc.

I am this way when trying to decide where to post my blog, comic or artwork online. I’ve studied all kinds of options.  I tried multiple services for years with my portfolio. I learned Flash and built animated menus. I tried free portfolios. Even MySpace for some dumb reason. I’ve used many hosting sites some of which really sucked and some were okay but overwhelming when trying to settle on a hosting package. I mean, what’s SSH, SSL, CGI, Ruby, RoR, Perl, PHP, and MySQL? Please don’t answer that. I really don’t want to know.

So to make this simple, I’m not going to go into all the options, hosts, sites and portals that you can use. Instead I will focus on the two best ways for artists to start a blog or comic online. I might talk about BAD options later, but not now.

The two best options are Google’s Blogger or WordPress.org. Both are great and could be your Internet home depending on what you want out of it.  Before you decide, here are pros and cons of each that are important to me as an artist.

Google’s Blogger (Blogspot domains)

Blogger – Pros

• Blogger is super easy
• Blogger has free hosting of your blog and files.
• Blogger is easy to access from any online computer.
• Blogger does not spam your site with unwanted ads.
• Blogger has a big artist community.
• You don’t need to know any programming at all. Period.

Blogger – Cons

• Blogger has to have (.blogspot) within you domain name. Unless you forward one to it but that costs money.
• Blogger has limited templates to choose from.
• Blogger does not have a menu bar.
• If you want to move to another host later then all your permalinks are permafried.

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WordPress.org with ComicPress template

WordPress – Pros

• ComicPress.
• WordPress has thousands of free plug-ins and widgets.
• which means WordPress is easy to customize to do ANYTHING you want.
• WordPress has the ComicPress template to help showcase your comics in addition to your blog.
• All your permalinks are registered to your domain name so they can be moved to a different host without changing your links.
• WordPress has page options and so it could pass as a website or portfolio as well as a blog.
• Comicpress allows you to click through your comic pages easily as well as many other features.

WordPress – Cons

• WordPress takes a bit more time to set up.
• ComicPress takes some knowledge of CSS to customize.
• WordPress needs a webhost to store your files.
• You need to buy a domain name and web hosting service.
• I recently noticed lots of spam comments. But this can be controlled. It’s still a little hassle.

So there you have it. If you want things as simple as possible then use Blogger but don’t expect it to be unique. If you want more info on the two then do the google search: Blogger vs. WordPress. You might want to get comfortable. It’s an endless search. But that just proves they are the two best choices.

I switched to WordPress because I wanted to start having a professional presence on the web. I wanted my site/blog to have a unique feel as well as other pages with links and information aside from my blog. I liked the idea of controlling my permalinks and content too. Here’s what reMINDblog looked like on Blogger. It’s still active but I rarely update it.  But if you decide to set up a WordPress blog then I strongly recommend one host.

Bluehost.com

I’ve used many hosts before and the only one I will recommend is Bluehost. In fact Bluehost will give you a free Domain name for life if you use them as your host.  It’s $6.95 a month for everything.  Wordpress recommends Bluehost above all the other hosts and Bluehost is the only one to offer a WordPress auto install. I used it and it set up everything in a minute and logged me onto my new WordPress site. Bluehost also includes everything you need for WordPress and Comicpress to function. Bluehost has unlimited bandwidth. This is important if your art or comic gets popular. You don’t want your site getting shut down when tons of people start flocking to it or be forced to pay more money for more bandwidth.

I decided to start calling the spreads "pages" now because I don't like that Google's number 3 keyword for my site is "spread". In case you are wondering why the page numbers don't quite match up to the spread number, it's because I'm using the page number of the printed book just so I don't get confused. Worry not, you are still seeing all the pages here.

How to get 10,000 unique viewers in 3 days.

So if anyone wants to know how to get 10,000 unique viewers in 3 days, then write an article about how much you love or hate Comic Sans MS and submit it to a few sites. A warning though. With great arguments comes heated comments. Not so much on my blog but on the websites linked to my article. 

Most of the negative comments came from my statement that people will hate you for using Comic Sans in your comic. Now I know the truth, may people will hate you for talking about Comic Sans no matter what the context. So to please all the haters, I have changed my statement from "many people will hate you" to "many letterers will want to dropkick you." I hope you will take me seriously from now on. I never joke. Comic artists don't exaggerate anything. EVER.

I was going to compose a top ten list of hate comments from other sites linking to my post but it would be to hard to weed through. Plus, some are so vulgar it would make a drunk navy trucker quiver. So I decided to share one of the funniest comments I read among the rantings. And here it is:

"Comic Sans is based on Watchmen. Why do you hate Alan Moore?"

This quote truely sums up the power of the internet. I laughed, I cried. I scratched my head because, Wow!

First of all, Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, not lettered by him. Dave Gibbons lettered Watchmen and in an interview with him he says Comic Sans is "an appalling-looking font" and "Comic Sans is so ugly" and "The major sin about it that really bugs me is that it only includes the uppercase I, the one with bars on the top and bottom, which as you know, you only use in comics for the first-person pronoun."  Read the interview here.

With all the opinionated controversy behind me, it's time for my next subject. Why Mac's are better then PC's. ha!

I finally got my Page Rank back!

I'm sure there are a number of you who love this technical stuff like PageRank and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but I am mostly clueless about making my site stand out on search engines. From what I know, search engines like Google, rank websites depending on things like who and how many links they have going to them. The more incoming links a site has the higher the page rank. The higher the page rank, the better chance that site has of being displayed in a search with similar keywords.

Before I switched from Blogger to WordPress, my site had a 3 out of 10. Shortly after I switched, it dropped to 0 and I couldn't figure out how to get Google to know I had switched. Apparently I didn't submit a sitemap to google. My IT guy helped me and a week later my site was recognized by google again. I now have a 3 out of 10 page rank.  The funny thing is, I still had the same amount of traffic after dropping to a "0" as I did with a "3" from before. So now I'm trying to figure out why. It seems like many of you understand this better then I do so maybe you can shed some light on it. I also read that there is a difference between a PageRank and a page rank. So confusing. Anyway, I have a 3 now and I feel better about myself but I'm not sure what it's really doing for me.