comics using flash

Discuss the future, present and past of sequential art.

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Bob Stevenson
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Post by Bob Stevenson »

I give up and humbly ask for help. There must be someone here who's had the same problem. I have started producing my comic pages in Flash. I've done this for a number of reasons - vector graphics fit my art style, they keep the file size and load time down, and allow me to experiment all while learning the often frustrating action script.(Get to the point)

How can I get a flash file or browser to check for a new version of the file rather than load the one from the user cache? The refresh button seems to have no effect. Clearing my browser cache does nothing either.

Because on-line comics update so regularly, I thought this might be the place to come with this question. How do you make sure visitors see the latest version of your home page/comic pages - html or flash?

Can I do it through Javascript or Action Script? Thanks for any help. I'm hoping there's an easy answer to this. I'm thinking there's not.

Also, please consider starting up another jam. At this point, it's becoming difficult to add a coherent card to an at-times incoherent story-line. It has been fun to watch though.

Thanks,

Bob Stevenson
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Alexander D.
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Post by Alexander D. »

I sometimes use flashtext for making logos, and I have definitely had the same problem you're having. Any other change I made on the page would update just fine, but it would just keep the same damn WRONG flash image, even though the image had been replaced.

I never figured out *why* this happened, but I did find that if I deleted the flash graphic entirely, then refreshed, then inserted the new graphic and refreshed again, I got the right image to display.

It's not a very satisfying solution, but it's the best I've come up with.
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Greg Stephens
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Post by Greg Stephens »

On 2002-03-07 14:19, Bob Stevenson wrote:
Also, please consider starting up another jam. At this point, it's becoming difficult to add a coherent card to an at-times incoherent story-line. It has been fun to watch though.
Not to stray off the main topic of your post, but I've plans to make the jam easier to follow. There may be another jam when this one finishes- I've a couple of other themes to suggest.
Good morning! That's a nice tnetennba.
Bob Stevenson
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Post by Bob Stevenson »

Sorry to bother you. I think I've solved my own problem.

Our system administrator told me to try playing with the meta tags in the header. That seems to do the trick. For anyone who's interested, the tag that works for me is:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="500"> The 500 tells the browser to refresh every 500 seconds. I'm going to use a big number here because I update once a day at most. Sorry to bother you with silly HTML questions but code has been the biggest obstacle in the way of me experimenting with on-line comics.

I'm sure there's been a discussion about this before but my goal is to have as little between my pen and the visitor's experience with my art and ideas as possible. I'm able to produce a ten panel page start to finish in about three hours. I haven't posted many because code issues keep eating into the time during which I should be drawing and writing. After ten or twelve starts and stops including a move half way around the world, I'm closer to regular updates than ever.

I assume I'm not the only one for whom this is frustrating. I think I'm closer than ever because of this forum though. Some of your sites, artwork, and even the 52 pick-up cards are proving to me that regular production on-line is possible. Thanks for getting me back into the fray.

Bob Stevenson
Journeyintohistory.com

Alexander D.
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Post by Alexander D. »

We all have our own obstacles, I think. For me, it's the actual drawing that's slow and frustrating. Once I get to the Web stuff, it's a huge relief, since for me, that's the fun easy part.
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Post by Thomas »

I whole heartedly agree about the coding part of online comics being the most frustrating boring part of this whole work. I have had tons of problems since I began my project at http://www.gutterflycomix.com but I am slowly getting the hang of it. I havent had the problems with the flash or any other images not refreshing (though I dont use that much flash yet), but thanx for alerting us to the possiblity of this problem. Keep pluggining away at it and it will come easier in time.


Thanks,
Thomas Clemmons
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rcar
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Post by rcar »

I was making my comics with flash but started to get frustrated with ll the time spent coloring and doing the flash work. Drawing and writing is what I love to do so I have been developing a new strip without flash. Just pen and ink, scanned and posted. It will be up in a couple of weeks.
Alexander D.
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Post by Alexander D. »

For those of you who really hate the coding involved in building your Web page -- have you considered getting a WYSIWYG HTML editor? I know most of the ones that are available are crap, but Dreamweaver is wonderful. I described its virtues at greater length in the "Any Online Tuturials" thread -- so if you want more info on it, you can find some over there.

I realize the price can be prohibitive, but if you can find a used copy on e-bay, it's definitely worth it.
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Post by Merlin »

>For me, it's the actual drawing that's slow
> and frustrating.

I'm the same. Thinking stuff up is the fun bit and coding is something I can do with a bit of music in the background without really having to pay too much attention to what I'm doing. Making the artwork, however, seems to take forever. And even though I know it's something I have to do for the project to work, it feels like wasted effort. There's part of me saying "look, you've already had the idea so you know what the thing should like like - why do you need to spend all this time making the pictures?"

I've got round this a few times by starting with a series of almost ready-made images first (digital photographs and the like) and then writing whatever story seems to fit around them.

Or sometimes I'll write out a scene or an idea for a scene, but then put it aside until a suitable group of images come along. Similarly, I'll often save a sequences of likely looking images and put them aside in case I come up with a use for them later.

Things like this: http://e-merl.com/hyper/hapf/hf3.htm this: http://e-merl.com/april.htm this: http://e-merl.com/madman.htm and this: http://e-merl.com/wpend.htm all came from those sort of techniques.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Merlin on 2002-03-08 18:39 ]</font>
Anon

meta tag

Post by Anon »

Meta tags can help you, in addition to that refresh tag mentioned earlier, try this one too:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 20 Jun 1995 04:13:09 GMT">

Because it sets your experation in the past, proxy servers and caching servers will consider the page to be expired and not cache it.
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