Is there a way to create a thumbnail page of all the characters and backgrounds? Might make strip creation a little easier to see everything in one place.

Or I could just shut the hell up.

Well, I think there are three main problems with the thumbnail idea. Problem 1 is, who's going to do the thumbnails? Problem 2 is that adding thumbnails is pretty much no different than adding new images to the site, and that increases bandwidth and costs Brad money. Problem 3 is that, if we use a 32 x 32 thumbnail (which is probably the smallest we could go for), 100 of these would take up 320 x 320, like 12% of the viewable screen. 200 images, and we lose almost a quarter of the screen.

Might I suggest flipping through the whole collection of images a few times? That way, you'll get a feel for what you have to work with and be able to do the visualization in your head. The more comics you do, the easier the visualization will get.

Devin

All good points. Thank you. I guess that my replies would be that 1) I would be happy to help out and create an HTML page full of thumbnails, if requested. I am a natural insomniac anyway, so it would give me something to do. Besides trying to count all the hairs on my dog. 2) I had not thought about the cost for additional bandwidth. I guess that is the major flaw in my idea. Damn you meddling kids. 3) In my master scheme, the thumbnail page would be a seperate page, as opposed to taking up the usable screen now. I was envisioning a page that would have the series name, followed by all the characters with their corresponding file name. You could toggle to the thumbnail page, finad a character you like, its series and file all in one shot.

I admit that I have not created many strips. Perhaps my noobness shows in that. As a noob, the main problem is visualizing what you want, then trying to remember what series it is in. I end up toggling through a good bit of the collection just about every time I try a strip.

Ah well - Noob idea from a noob brain. Thanks for hearing me out anyway.

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I end up toggling through a good bit of the collection just about every time I try a strip.

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I'd be willing to host a page like this offsite if people thought it would be useful and somebody else made it. Are there a lot of people out there who would like to see this?

Well, I think the main thing is (as already touched upon) that you only have this problem when you are new to the site. Show me a regular who can't find their way around the make a comic page and maybe this idea would be one to pursue. Heck, if you could even show me someone who has been around for two or three months who has this problem, it would be worth considering.

As already well put by Devin, spend some time making some strips and it gets easier and easier.

Note: CrunchyCheese, your comics are pretty darn good.

I would like to see it, actually. I think it's a good idea. Maybe there could be an on-site page that links to images off-site, just for continuity.

And enough with the nervous humility, Cheese-boy.

I support this idea, sure, I know where everything is, but that's no reason for me to be against it.

Have you noticed most "noobs" use all Kaddar art? I guess if I thought hard enough I could come up with some kind of theory as to why that is, but if I did that, I'd probably be sick.

I think it's a good idea - I mean, I've used SC for quite a while, but even I forget which characters belong to which group, and sometimes I use one character where, in hindsight, the comic would've worked better with another character...

Just my thoughts.

Like everyone has said, there's no reason NOT to have something like this, provided that the images are stored off-site also.

A couple of concerns though. Are you sure you want to do this, Dan? I mean, you'd have to monitor sc for new artwork frequently. And what about subscription art (if that's actually happening)?

So anyway, what does Brad have to say about this?

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A couple of concerns though. Are you sure you want to do this, Dan? I mean, you'd have to monitor sc for new artwork frequently.

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See, the simple solution is that you don't need thousands of different characters and backgrounds. All comics can be made with the exploding dog stick guy and the diesel background. Seriously. Don't bother with any of that other stuff.

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All comics can be made with the exploding dog stick guy and the diesel background. Seriously. Don't bother with any of that other stuff.

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150031

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Have you noticed most "noobs" use all Kaddar art? I guess if I thought hard enough I could come up with some kind of theory as to why that is, but if I did that, I'd probably be sick.

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If somebody wants to make this, I can probably host it. Depends on the size I guess, but I can't see it being too horrible.

If it's too big and bandwidth gets to be an issue we can work out some sort of other hosting arrangement. Seems unlikely it'd be a problem though.

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Have you noticed most "noobs" use all Kaddar art? I guess if I thought hard enough I could come up with some kind of theory as to why that is, but if I did that, I'd probably be sick.

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well - here is what I had been working on...

http://www.pyramid.net/edrox/sc/sc.htm

Not really "thumbnails" though are they? None the less, it does the job.

No big deal to make them smaller though. Takes me about 10 minutes

OK - less than 10 minutes

http://www.pyramid.net/edrox/sc/sc.htm

Just a quick note... adjusting the HTML "height" and "width" properties for the tag doesn't actually reduce the amount of space the images take up. So depending on whether you want to reduce the size on the disk or the size on the screen, you might want to consider actually shrinking the images.

I was more concerned about the screen "real estate" so I just scaled down the images themselves. Physically opening, shrinking, and re-saving every iage would be far too time consuming for me.

I have only done about half the available characters, but am not going to continue if the community does not think this would be a useful item.

If you guys want it, and will use it, I can continue. If not, I can stop.

No blood, no foul

I think it's a great idea, and I don't you to stop. But I think we should loosen up this whole "no blood," thing. I want the page, but I also want blood.

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Just a quick note... adjusting the HTML "height" and "width" properties for the tag doesn't actually reduce the amount of space the images take up. So depending on whether you want to reduce the size on the disk or the size on the screen, you might want to consider actually shrinking the images.

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Crunchy:

See, what we gotta do here is get alla them graphics, then run batch converter on them, resize them down to itty bitty file sizes, then you can do your html thing and we're done. Gimmie a PM and I'll tell you how.

I would think it should be fairly easy to create a php script that grabs all of the images and dynamically dumps them (re-sized) into a page.

I still know very little about php but I have a vague idea of how I would approach it. You could use a filesystem (?) object to get the names of the subdirectories of /image and put those directory names in an array. (I'm not sure exactly what object php uses for this but I'm sure there's something that enables retrieving directory contents.) Then, get the file names in each of those directories and associate them with their category with either customized objects or a two-dimensional array or something along those lines. (If the files and categories are already in a database, you wouldn't even need to bother with all of that, but I don't think they are.) Then it's a simple matter of generating the page with the category names and image names.

I think brad can handle it, despite the fact he's Canadian. Maybe if he's too busy raping mooses or playing hockey I could do some experimentation on my own and send over a completed script. It would take me a while, though, and it would suck, of course.

If bandwidth is an issue and someone else wants to host the thing, there could be a script on SC that just generates the list of file names, categories, and paths and then the host would just need to have a script that can extract the data from the SC page. (Or could one just write a script to get the directories and file names straight off the SC server? I wouldn't know how to do it but I suppose it's possible.) It might just be better, however, to shrink the images down. The extra storage space the new images take up would be negligible compared to the bandwidth eaten up each time a page with full-sized files is loaded. Maybe a combination of shrinking and dynamic page generation is the best answer. The batch conversion would be a good way to convert all of the existing files but some manual labor would still be required to generate shrunken versions of new images as they get added.

OK, maybe I shouldn't have had that second espresso.

Oh, and backgrounds should be included.