Hey, my site remodel is complete!

It took me close to a month to design it, but only a couple days to make the files work. The most recent burst of enthusiasm and inspiration for the project came actually from my day-job, of all things. I was tasked last week with designing a couple blogs - one for our company, and one for our clients. Many hours were spent tinkering with css and html templates, learning the finer points of ExpressionEngine, and looking at about a bazillion other blogs for ideas and layouts. And oddly enough, when those two projects were done, I had a much better idea about what I wanted to do with my own site.

And so, here we are! The newly redesigned and redirected Lunar Bistro! One of the things that's different is that I won't be running episodic comics at the top of the blog anymore. I'll still be posting comics here and there when time allows, but they'll just be going up on the Comics page in their entirety. Any comics that are going to be posted episodically, like the current Circle Weave run, or the upcoming Ellie Connelly, will be done on their own self-styled sites. Which brings me to the next step of the redesign:

The Circle Weave needs a site update. Not a whole new style, I'm pretty happy with how it looks, actually, but I need to update the codebase, get the blog up and running again, and re-post all the comics using the new technique I've got planned. This new technique is the key to me running episodic comics in the future, actually, and was part of what was holding me up on this whole redesign.

The way it's going to work is this: each comic's blog will be set up using MovableType, with a category set aside for 'comic updates'. When I post a new episode to this category, it shows up at the top of the homepage, separate from the other regular blog posts, and also on its own separate rss feed. Since Circle Weave has already been posted, and is currently a 'dead' comic, I don't feel bad using it to experiment with this process. I want to make sure it's good and solid before I start relying on it for Ellie.

Which brings me to Ellie. I'm only 7 pages in, and none of it is fully colored. I'm not happy about my progress so far, but it's something. And when I think about it, it's close to seven weeks worth of updates, even if I just post it in black and white, or with simple colors for the time being. I can always go back later and update the colors when I have time. It's my hope that simply posting the work regularly and getting feedback on it will encourage me to continue working and pushing forward with the project.

So, I'm hoping to have the site up and running (meaning with new comics and all) in time for Stumptown in April.

So, yeah, that's my plan. This site will continue to be my general comics/art/sketch blog, and if I manage to start regularly doing stuff for Illustration Friday it'll go here as well. And there will always be updates about the comics I'm working on, or wanting to work on.

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