Thinkcorps

It’s long overdue that I write something up on A.D.: After the Deluge, the webcomic we’ve been producing on SMITH since early this year. I’m tremendously proud of how this story is coming together, and it’s great to be a part of something this good.

A.D. is the story of 6 Hurricane Katrina survivors, written and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, a tremendous artist, and produced by Larry and myself for our webzine, SMITH. It combines an original webcomic, presented in monthly installments, with in-chapter hyperlinks, along with audio & video shot by us with the characters from the story.

If I’ve piqued your interest by now, then by all means, go—read the story! Otherwise, I figured I could go into some of the behind-the-scenes action detailing how we’ve put all this together.

Behind A.D.: After the Deluge

A big part of what we do at SMITH is to focus our collective editorial talents at telling true, personal stories. It should be clear to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Web that “user generated content” [the term preferred by our new robot overlords—whom I wholeheartedly welcome :) ] is a big deal these days. What most people miss however, is that this phenomenon is inextricably tied to our online explorations of identity and presence. In other words, all these blogs, social networks, communities, etc. are just us figuring out who we are and how we relate to each other—the same epic human struggle for meaning in the universe.

That’s a long way of saying we feel we still have relevance as editors, but we cannot pretend to control conversations or be gatekeepers of quality. Editors have to play a more subservient role going forward, but that’s another story, isn’t it? :)

The Foundations of SMITH and A.D.

Larry always likes to say, “There’s no one that does more with less than SMITH.” And I think he’s right. SMITH is a self-funded proposition to date, a labor of love. We’ve been doing this for a little over 18 months now, generated acclaim, two book deals (a deal for A.D. will make three), and most important, made a lot of new friends. It’s been difficult at times to balance work and SMITH, especially when (as it is with most Web work) you sometimes feel like your efforts are being sucked into the gaping black maw of the Net.

I’ll tell you though, going to SXSW this past year was an eye-opener. There were so many people there who knew our name and liked what we were doing. The support was amazing, and whenever I get frustrated, I think back to that. Lesson? Remember that you have friends.

Which brings me to Web2.0 frothiness. If you’re doing it for money, you will lose and your efforts will be forgotten. I’ve been on this rollercoaster since it started, and let me tell you, it’s all been done before, only the names have changed. What makes a difference is how much you care about your product.

It’s also been said that “competition is good,” it means there’s a market there. And it’s almost un-American not to get riled up with “competitive spirit”. The truth is, competition only exists in your mind. The Net’s growing, you’re growing, there’s room for everyone to play nice with each other. Until there’s one customer left and five of you competing for him or her, it’s a waste of your brain power and time.

So, do what you want, and get what you need out of it. Fame is fleeting and Britney Spears is a nut-job.

On to the good stuff!

What Powers A.D.?

We run everything at SMITH on the amazing Wordpress CMS/blogging system. It’s open source, has an amazing developer community, and is extremely well-built and easy to extend. I have written several custom plugins and template functions to bend Wordpress to my will. It’s easy to learn and extend, and it’s flexibility is balanced with the very nice WP-Cache plugin, which returns the speed you lost for all that flexibility.

Favorite plugins for A.D. include:

• Akismet
• Audio Player (audio files are hosted on a third-party podcast service)
• WP-Cache
• Wordpress Database Backup
• Sociable
• ... and lots of custom functions

It’s also been easy for our editors to learn, which is very important. That’s the true power of Wordpress, it’s simplicity. I’ve tried tons of other content management systems, and while powerful, they were almost completely inscrutable.

“Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” (Albert Einstein)

Each chapter is a post, with each panel image on its own page. I’ve written some custom functions (which I’m not releasing, so don’t ask, because I can’t offer support or field questions) to stitch the chapters together, allowing you to read them one after another. This was challenging, since the “previous chapter” link needs to go to the last page of the previous chapter. By making a chapter a post, chapter comments can be neatly grouped together. This seemed the best solution (vs. allowing comments on each panel).

Image hosting was a huge issue, since each panel runs around 80-100KB. We want to preserve the artwork’s quality, but we’ve also got bandwidth issues to contend with. The solution I came up with is to host all our images at Photobucket. We have a free account, and I just upload all the images there. What’s great about Photobucket is that they are continually adding more features to their service like slideshows. I haven’t taken advantage of this yet, but it’s nice to know that all our artwork is hosted on a reliable, flexible system.

I wrote a PHP script that generates a chapter post (all the Photobucket image links and Wordpress ‘next page’ links) by traversing a local directory of the chapter panel images. I enter in the directory I want to read, and the script reads through all the images, figures out their exact sizes, and generates a Photobucket link for each image. This saves a lot of time!

Early on, it became clear that I couldn’t use a default panel image width and height in my image links, and just change the image name. Each image might be sized a little differently. The PHP script deals with different dimensions gracefully, so I can accommodate whatever artwork Josh delivers. I just paste the script’s result into a Wordpress post and make the rest of the content modifications by hand.

I use Fireworks to resize and optimize all the images I receive. I tried batching this process at first, but each image differs in complexity, so I do each optimization by hand now, adjusting quality according to the image. I generally don’t worry about the final image size anymore and don’t reduce JPEG quality below 70%.

So, that’s about the size of it. Fireworks, Wordpress, Photobucket, and a few PHP hacks to speed things along. There’s probably more detail I could go into, but I’ll leave that for a future post. So if anyone happens to have any questions, just leave a comment and I will try and respond as quickly as possible, either directly or in a forthcoming post.

Now, go read A.D.: After the Deluge!