After many years of soft work and toil, a new site has been added to the empire! comicula: home to some more recent, ultra-low-quality sketches and other nonsense that makes me chuckle, if nothing else ;)

Thanks to a careful practice of omitting dates from my handiwork, the exact details have been lost to history. Regardless, sometime around 2006-ish (while I was studying at UT), I started filling in the remaining pages of the plant book with illustrations of various silly situations that happend to cross my mind. Eventually, as I continued to write more and more, I had the idea of creating a newfangled blog-style site to publish them.

And that’s where it stood for a few years :) Eventually, I dusted off the old idea and started research blog software. Wanting to test things out on the existing site, I chose WordPress as the PHP-based platform. From there it was just a matter of endless tweaking until it fit my exacting demands ;)

Useful WordPress Plugins
Caching	Autoptimize WP Super Cache
Maintenance	Akismet WP-DBManager
Security	Secure WordPress Wordpress Firewall WP Security Scan

Most of the site features were accomplished using a custom WordPress theme. Starting with the nice, minimalistic Typograph theme as a base, I added support for random taglines (the funny phrases below the title, keyed off the current date), current-post highlighting (the little grey line in the list of posts in the sidebar), and numerous other small visual tweaks. Using some custom fields, the theme also supports “clever” CAPTCHA entries to screen out robot commenters, as well as transcript/closed-captioning for each post (which helps mitigate the increasing sloppiness of my handwriting ;). Finally, to simplify the site feed, I also ended up writing one small WordPress plugin (with the help of Add Code to RSS as a starting point).

Once I had the look of the site down, I gave it a new host and turned to configuring the backend. Here, I followed the guidance from the Hardening WordPress topic. After some initial instability (thanks to an over-enthusiastic attempt to rush through the setup), I wiped the slate clean and made steady progress over the period of a week. At last, with all the database configuration, permission checking, plugin installation, etc, completed, the site was finally ready for its first post!

All in all, a fun experiment — hopefully for others as well as myself ;)