Image via CrunchBase
First of all, I want to thank everyone who offered support back during my hard drive crash a couple weeks ago. And thank you for bearing with us through the problems and story interruption. As you can see we’re back on track now, but I hope you enjoyed the little mini-saga in the Hellcat Cosmoses we posted during the outage. I certainly did, and it gave me a chance to draw them. Something I don’t get to do nearly often enough and will have to try more often.
So if you look carefully you might have noticed there are some new features that were released today on Cosmic Hellcats. I upgraded our blogging software (Movable Type) this week and while I was at it decided it might be time to install a few new features. For starters, the navigation headers on each entry have changed slightly. The titles of comics are now the Storyline name followed by the date. This should make it a little easier to know what you’re reading.
Second, we’ve aded the ability to look at the previous and next blog entries. This was always possible with comics of course, but I never bothered to do it before for the blog entries. That was just a silly oversight that’s now been corrected. Now if only I remember to post to the Hellcats Blog more often that might really be useful. I’ve still never even uploaded the photos from Pittsburgh Comicon 2010. I really need to get on that.
Third we’re now using Open Graph and Facebook Connect. For the non-technical among you, this means that Hellcats is now tied in to Facebook. Basically, you’ll notice that every comic and every blog post now has a Facebook “Like” button on it. If you’re a facebook member and you press that, it’ll mark the post as liked on your facebook wall for all your friends so they can see it as well. It’s a great way to support us here at Hellcats. So if you enjoy what you read here, then by all means press the button and help us out. Oh, and if any of your facebook friends come here, they’ll see your photo under the comic recommending it to them.
In addition to being able to “Like” a post here, you may also use your Facebook account to comment on posts here. Previously you had to create a local account here to comment (you still can of course, and by all means, please feel free to). Just click “Sign In” on any comment page and choose “Facebook” under “Sign in using…” If you’re already logged into Facebook, you’ll just need to approve Hellcats as an application (you only need to do this once) and you’re good to go. There’s still some bugs to work out. For some reason all comments that people have sent in as Facebook users so far have been marked as possible spam. So I’m watching for them and whitelisting anyone who is trying to use it but for now I have to do this by hand. I’ll be working on this more, but not tonight. And if anyone out there has any experience hacking Movable Type (especially the Facebook Commenters plugin) and has any insight they want to share with me, let me know. Oh, and if you try to comment and I don’t approve it within a couple hours, feel free to email me and let me know so I can look for it. Also, you can leave comments using Yahoo.com Accounts and AOL/AIM accounts with similar restrictions. I hope to add Livejournal and Google in the near future but I was having problems with bugs there as well.
Oh, and comments are threaded now. You can reply to them instead of just posting everything in a row. It’s not perfect, it’s a little weird to use, you have to either sign in (or choose comment anonymously) to show the comment window first, and then you click the “Reply to this comment” link on the appropriate comment. The comment window is always at the bottom of the screen but it will tell you right above the window what comment you’re replying to. It takes a little getting used to, but go ahead and try it out and let me know what you think.
We hope to be adding some more features in the near future. Like Twitter, more Facebook features and other goodies and hopefully I’ll also be adding some more photoshoots with the girls. It’s been way too long. So keep watching this space and in the meantime, I hope you’ve been enjoying the comic and please comment or send us mail and let us know. Oh, and if you haven’t already, since we’re talking so much about Facebook, please go and join our Facebook Fan Page over at http://www.facebook.com/CosmicHellcats.
And as always thank you everyone for all the support.
-Mav
∑8x)
