I’ve been rolling out a bunch of small-but-useful updates to the Leif & Thorn site lately, and wanted to show them off a bit!
Sorted by volume
As the print volumes build up, I got to thinking there should be an obvious way to jump between them in the digital archives.
…yes, you can do it on the Archive page, but I wanted something even more obvious. For the potential reader who picked up a paperback first, and is visiting the URL on the back for the first time.
So now those jumps are in the row of links above each comic!
Because servers would rather have browsers ask for “one large image” than “lots and lots of tiny images”, the base image looks like this:
Pretend for a minute that your budget is unlimited, the reach of your casting call is global, anyone you pick will have no trouble learning whatever language(s) we film in…oh, and the set/crew will magically stay COVID-19-free. It’s a fantasy, okay, we do what we want.
Which actors would you cast to play the Leif & Thorn characters?
Who plays Leif? How about Thorn? The knights? The servants? The magical girls? Your favorite secondary character?
After some serious code finagling, Crystalpedia is functional again!
In some ways it’s more functional than before. I decided to roll up my sleeves and edit the main template PHP — I’d been nervous about touching it, so I kept relying on plugins that splice in bits of code you have to upload in separate little files. Pretty sure an outdated plugin was part of why the site broke in the first place.
If you missed it, now is finally your chance to order Volume 2 via Gumroad (those books will be shipped once all the Kickstarter rewards are fulfilled), or get the Volume 2 ebook (those are instantly available to download!).
It’s finally time to reveal why I’ve been breaking the Leif & Thorn layout all weekend!
I’ve been pulling the CSS for colors and images into a separate stylesheet from the rest of the CSS (i.e. the fonts, the arrangement of sections, the padding…so much padding), so I could have multiple color/image themes and give everyone the option to toggle between them.
Starting with a seasonal Northern Lights theme. (And only halfway through December!)
Settling on the palette was the easy part. (And the fun part.) The hard parts were:
divvying up the properties correctly between the “Inkblot child theme” stylesheet and the color-scheme stylesheets, so nothing got duplicated, or accidentally dropped
updating a whole bunch of non-transparent images that only worked on a theme with a white background
combing through error-spawning code for the missing period/semicolon/curly-brace
learning how to keep stylesheets from getting flagged as “insecure content”
realizing the After Dark pages were going to try to load the default color-scheme stylesheet, so I needed a style that wouldn’t override it
realizing that, while keeping the default scheme from overriding the After Dark scheme, I had prevented it on loading from a bunch of other pages at all
giving the Firefox Code Inspector a workout
giving the W3C’s exhaustive guide to CSS properties a workout
giving Notepad++’s side-by-side document view a workout
testing how it looks when you move an element 5 pixels to the left…then putting it back…then trying it 5 pixels to the right…
sitting back and waiting for the server-side cache to update so I could finally see if the live results matched the previews
…and now, finally, it’s in a state where I feel ready to show it off.
There’s a couple of new buttons in the left-hand sidebar that will let you switch between Northern Lights and the original theme, Blue Castle. Check them out.
The buttons are supposed to set a cookie in your browser that remembers your chosen theme when you visit different pages…but I can’t seem to get that part working. If anybody can take a look at the source code and figure out what’s missing, it would be much appreciated!
And in general, if you run into any new problems while browsing the site, comment here and let me know. Gotta tackle them while my debugging mojo is still flowing.
To keep creator expenses down, Whitlock sends these unbound, so what I got in the mail was a big stack of loose pages and an un-cropped cover. Check them out:
As usual, I’m going to take a couple days and look through it, make sure everything came out okay. It’s hard to tell in this photo, but the cover printed a little dark — I’ll probably adjust the values and send the printer a new source file.
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