Tangents Site Update
No doubt some of you have noticed several changes I’ve done to Tangents just recently (and I’m not talking about loading the December 2007 archives onto the system). One change is the removal of several tags; it dawned on me that I don’t need tags for existing categories. Seeing that these tags were used in just about every article, it wasn’t particularly useful.
Another change lies in an alteration of the Secant category. Originally, Secants were meant to be brief reviews that gave a “moment-in-time” for a specific comic. That changed and grew to become all three-paragraph (or less) reviews. Seeing that I’m trying to restore Secants to their original meaning, I’ve removed from Secants a number of reviews that don’t fit the new classification.
Part of the reason for these changes lies with a recent review of Tangents. While the start of his review brings up some of the antics of certain shock-“reviewers” who had issues with me, Morgan Wick dissects my work with respect and intelligence (in sharp contrast to the insults flung by the Tangents-haters out there), and pointed out several significant flaws with my style. I don’t agree with everything he said by far, but he brought up a couple valid issues.
One of these issues lies with my tendency to treat everything like an essay. I’ll admit, I have some difficulty starting these reviews. I’ll often go through a dozen incarnations of the start before finding something that I’m not completely disgusted with. Unfortunately, when I’m writing a three-paragraph review on a comic, I honestly shouldn’t waste time building up to my point. No doubt half of the Secants on my site could be told in half the words. It’s something I’ll work on rectifying.
I’d be interested to hear your opinions as well. What do you think works in Tangents? What do you want to see more of? And for that matter, what do you feel doesn’t work and should be avoided?
Additional archives will be added in the next couple of days while I edit image titles and fix broken links.
Addendum: All of November, 2007, has been loaded into the archives, along with part of October of 2007.
Finally had time to read Morgan’s blog. Now, let’s see…
First of all, I *like* the essay-style. It’s always a good read. But on the other hand, if having smaller secants helps you write more of them, then by all means, go for it.
As for the humor element that Morgan mentioned: I’m not sure. I actually don’t miss it, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that it could be better. But I think the topic of whatever webcomic will already convey a specific mood, so there’s no immediate need to pile more humor on top of it.
What I’d like to see more? A review of a webcomic that I don’t know yet! ;)
It has been a while since you last pointed me at something new. (okay granted: something new /is/ pretty hard to find with me!)
But apart from that I’m pretty much fine with the mix of strip-secants, comic-secants and meta-articles.
Just don’t let these “Tangents-haters” influence you. We both know that writing about something you hate says less about the topic than about yourself.
Oh, and btw: can you increase the width of this comment box here and the font size in it? It’s both horribly small – or do I just need new glasses? ¬.¬
I’ve a couple of new comics I plan on reviewing. It’s been a matter of time and inspiration (and finishing the bloody comic! Damn but archives seem to be getting longer and lon– oh wait, they are!). Amusingly enough, one comic I was hesitant on reviewing (it was a guilty pleasure of mine and I wasn’t sure about its NSFW content and cloying storyline) vanished from the web. ^^;; Ah well.
I don’t quite know how to adjust the width of columns and the like here. I’ll ask around concerning this because to be honest, I’d like the review site itself to be another 50 or so characters wide at least. And yes, the text in the comment box here is tiny isn’t it? oO Probably something about the CSS… I’ll have to start fiddling around with that.
I’m not going to abandon the essay style. But I think it has more of a place with the longer reviews, rather than the three-paragraph reviews that overtook Secants for a bit. ^^;; Though I will admit, more than one of the tangents I’ve written started out as Secants and ended up too large for the old Secant format.
As for the humor content of the reviews… I have a sense of humor? oO (Well, I do. I just am horrid at showing humor in my writing, except incidentally.)
Thanks for commenting. :) Now to get out the CSS for Dummies book and try to decipher the current CSS format….
Rob H.
I think one thing he misses is that one of the ways you were differentiating yourself from Websnark was that Eric has been about “Bringing the Funny” and you felt that a discussion of comics that were more about drama and story was missing. Humor is certainly not a necessary component of webcomic reviews, and would likely be singularly out of place for some of the comics you have reviewed.
I’d say time is probably the biggest factor in your reviews changing. It takes time to seek out new webcomics, catch up on their archives and compose a full linked review of them. It is easier to pick something that you are already reading and make a note of some happening on it.
I certainly wouldn’t cut back on your discussion of meta elements of webcomics, they are usually some of the most thought provoking in their subject matter and the discussions that lead out of them.
What I’m missing at the current site is a somewhat elusive aspect. One thing that pulled me to websnark was the quality of the subsequent commentary on his postings. We’ve also had some great discussions in the Tangent forums back on your previous site. But, either your readership hasn’t come back with the new site, or your current setup doesn’t provoke discussion as I’ve not seen the same level of feedback recently.
I think the forum format suits your sites more. Without the daily traffic that Websnark used to have, post specific comments are harder to develop momentum on. And sometimes the posts resurrecting subjects months later were the best discussion hooks. Something to think about anyways, as I also know what a headache it can be to run a forum and ideally it would be best to have a means to the same level of discussion without a big increase in your workload keeping you from writing commentary.
To be honest, at this point I’ve maybe a third to a quarter of my readers when P2P closed shop. Part of this may be the lack of redirect link from P2P, and a larger part because I didn’t have an immediate replacement site. If I’d been more proactive in looking for a host rather than researching HTML and CSS and find the host afterward… then I could have *ahem* borrowed the code Glych created for P2P and tweaked some basic changes. Or gone over to WordPad early on, for that matter.
Even so, I’ve had over a dozen people sign up as users to leave comments. Most haven’t yet… but the community is starting to grow. It’ll reach critical mass, and we’ll no doubt see that sense of community that was intermittent in the forums re-emerge.
The funny thing is, I’ve all the forum files from the old P2P forums. If it wasn’t for the fact that new forum software is available, I’d have loaded that right up; instead, I’m going to wait for a friend of mine who knows this stuff to have some quiet time and then work to install new forums and have them co-exist with the comments fields for those who prefer the forum structure.
Rob H.
Having grey text on a grey background can’t help the readership numbers.
That’s odd. With me it’s a white background using Firefox, with grey borders. What browser are you using? (I’m using the Deep Blue Theme, rather than something I coded; I’m afraid I’m not really sure how to code in CSS.)
In line 16 of http://www.tangents.us/wp-content/themes/deep-blue-wordpress-theme/deep-blue/style.css, the body background colour is set to
#474747. In line 148, the text colour for the main content is set to#444, which when expanded to 8 bits per component becomes#444444, which is quite close to the#474747of the background.The white colour you’re seeing comes from the image http://www.tangents.us/wp-content/themes/deep-blue-wordpress-theme/deep-blue/img/body.gif. In short, the theme depends on images being loaded or it becomes illegible.
Fortunately, the fix is easy: add a line saying
as line 149 of the style sheet, just after the
Hmm. Looks like I’ll need to figure out how to make changes to the CSS permanent. But considering I’ve wanted to expand the width of the middle column in any event (and someone else asked if I could increase the width of the Comments field and enlarge the font of comments being typed), there’s no time like the present.
Thanks for the input. :)
Rob H.