Zwol.org

My favorite so far is "The Secret of the Amazing Cosmic Windu" but there're plenty more where that came from.

Of course, "The Lost Magic Force from Outer Space" and "The Creeping Unknown Princess" aren't bad either.

Next Generation, to be precise. Season one is out on DVD so, of course, I had to get that. 26 episodes of 24th-Century goodness. I've only watched a couple so far, but am anticipating a full-on Trek-fest in the near future.

So tell me- What time does that leave for drawing?

Planning to see Viggo Mortensen's art at the Track 16 Bergamot Station gallery tomorrow. Tried to go before, but who would have guessed that the gallery wouldn't be open on a Sunday? Then it seems like a good time to go catch a showing of the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (again!) if only to see the new preview footage for The Two Towers.

Interesting note- It seems that the Beatles were interested in making a LotR film back in the 60s. John Lennon as Gollum? It could have happened.

A New York Times article has spawned some opinions. Part of that says:

Even without new technologies crowding the spotlight, the Web today seems to be less than inspiring. About half of Internet users in 2000, for example, said the Internet helped "a lot" in enabling them to learn new things. A year later, when the same group was polled, only 39 percent made that claim.

I first ran across some discussion at Comicon.com's forums and added a post which reads, in part:

I think it's because people have become more used to the web and have a better understanding of what it is. We know what we want out of it and therefore spend less time just bumming around. We've become more goal-oriented with our surfing sessions and more quickly discard useless sites. I don't think this is a bad thing.

I've just discovered that Dave Winer agrees:

It's true it was fun (for a few minutes) to watch a fish tank on a webcam. But that was not the promise or purpose of the Web. Maybe [Glenn David, Cool Site of the Day founder] thought that's what it was. If so, he missed the point. It's about publishing without the middlemen.

It's so simple, yet it eludes so many.

From their profile page at SoundClick.com:

PSYCHEDELIC PROGRESSIVE PUNK ART ROCK - AMBIENT SALSA - POWER POLKA - SPACE FUNK - THUNDEROUS NEW AGE POWER BOOGIE - Check out a few tracks and see if you've got what it takes to endure the sonic fury that is THE PRICE BEACONS. ... The Price Beacons are actually alter egos of the members of Pentagon Trees, a melodic pop-rock band that while recording would spontaneously channel an interdimensional musical force that took over their insturments and voices for long periods of time, forcing them to surrender to a sinister and impulsively wild 'winky bin' sound.

I've been saying it and saying it- I love Google and today I find out how they manage to deliver such great search results- Pigeons.

Google's pigeon-driven methods make tampering with our results extremely difficult. While some unscrupulous websites have tried to boost their ranking by including images on their pages of bread crumbs, bird seed and parrots posing seductively in resplendent plumage, Google's PigeonRank technology cannot be deceived by these techniques.

You've all been rather patient while the website has been effectively stalled these past months, so I thought I should fill you in on my recent spate of activity and what I'm working on. I've been working hard on updating the site's inner workings to make it more useful to me before I get back to serious work on more comics. Trying to remain focused on one thing at a time.

First up is revamping the way the comics are tracked. I've designed a database system to keep track of them which will do a lot more things than the current system. It will allow me to do things like change the file types- used to be that I could only use .gif files in the archive, now I'll be able to use .gif, .jpg, .png, .html- whatever. I've also written a little conversion utility that will populate the database with all of the existing comics so that I don't have to do the data-entry by hand.

This also allows me to incorporate the No Contest and Reiterating Comics comics in a more meaningful way- They'll have their own galleries that will be easy to reference and won't be scattered around in the middle of the regular Zwol archive. The new system will also allow me to show off pictures I've received that don't fit into any of the above archives.

When the finishing touches are placed on that, I'm going to revamp the bookmarks to use a database system as well so that I can add bookmarks and reorganize them on the fly. This will help keep them current and allow me to have more useful information stored there. It'll probably work a little like Yahoo!'s categorizing. There are a ton of comics out there that I'd like to link to, but redoing all of my links pages every time I discover one isn't ever something that I wanted to do. This will also allow that hopelessly out of date "Recommended" section on the index page to be kept more current.

After that- new comics.

Just discovered that a final book of Douglas Adams' writing will appear next month. It's a posthumous collection, according to Amazon.com, "rescued from his four computers, culled from an archive of chapters from his long-awaited novel-in-progress, as well as his short stories, speeches, articles, interviews, and letters." I'd heard rumors of such a thing being published shortly after his death last year, but thought that such a book would not be a very good idea. Still, I must read it.

That, plus the release of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" on DVD makes for some at-long-last wish-granting for some Adams fans.

Search Google for "death and transfiguration web comic" and you find Zwol. Who knew?

Worked very late last night on the archive system. Only three big things remain on that front- Redoing the calendars, making sure that the automatic update will work and creating an interface for me so that I can manipulate and update the archives/galleries when I need to.

Regarding the changes that I was talking about yesterday to the archive system. One practical upshot is already working- slightly shorter URLs. Rather than needing to use a url like this: zwol.org/archive.php3?date=20010516&type=zwol, I can now use the slightly briefer URL of: zwol.org/archive.php3?zwol=20010516. It's still rather longish, but it is shorter and does look slightly more elegant.