Monthly Archives: January 2006

Loompanics is Going Out of Business

Uncategorized

Alas… probably the most mind-bending publisher and retailer of books the world has ever known, Loompanics Unlimited, is going out of business. I doubt any publisher in the history of the first amendment of the constitution has done as much to boldly push it into uncomfortable territory. Before they go away, they are offering 50% off of their entire stock… I never scored a copy of If We Can Keep A Severed Head Alive and now it’s out of print! Dammit! Oh, this is a sad day…

“Q: Why is your Catalog dedicated to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the tendency towards universal entropy – in short, over time, chaos will prevail. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…” (Yeats). Within society, Loompanics favors more entropy, i.e., less government laws and other social restrictions – increased anarchy. Within our own bodies, Loompanics favors less entropy, i.e., less degeneration and death. So the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at once a friend indeed, and a worthy adversary. America needs to loosen up.” – Mike Hoy, Loompanics propietor

Read a comic strip written by Mike Hoy and drawn by Bob Crabbe about the going out of business business here.

Using Blogger to Syndicate Your Comics on the Web for Free

Cartooning Lessons, Lessons, Useful Information

I’m using blogger to post my comics on the web (soapythechicken.com)… it works great, for my purposes. It makes content management extremely simple, and makes it easy to offer subscription via rss feeds.

It is totally unnecessary to have any knowledge of web page building or anything to use this system… the blogger system is extremely easy to set up, and they will host all of your content for you if you want them to (or you can host it yourself, as I do, but that takes a wee bit of work & knowledge).

It is well worth picking up a bit of basic html tagging knowledge for posting to your blog… there are only a couple that are absolutely necessary to know though… the “a href” tag for linking, and the “img” tag for adding images to your posts. Here’s a good “cheat sheet” for html. Really, this stuff is easier than pooping… don’t be intimidated by it. You just put one tag at the beginning of the area you want to affect and one at the end with a / to close it. And you can look at almost any page on the web for examples of how to do this by going to the view> source option in your browser. EASIER THAN POOPING!

Blogger will set you up with a basic template for your site to begin with, but you’ll most likely want to alter it. Again, a little knowledge of html goes a long ways to making your site more useful. For example, you will probably appreciate it greatly if you make the width of your content wider so you can do larger comics without breaking your page. The Soapy site is built off of the main default Blogger template, minima, with alterations to make the page wider, add a header, and to have some useful menus down the side. View the source and you can probably figure out how I did anything if you want to copy it for your own purposes. You may want to copy and save the template in a blank text file before you make any changes to it in case you accidentally make a change you don’t like.

My experience with the feeds produced by blogger hasn’t been so good. I tried hitting the feeds with myYahoo, and it didn’t work. However, I found a good solution… I set up another free account on feedburner.com to produce an alternate feed, and that one seems to work everywhere so far. It makes it so folks can go to the page and click on a button for their preferred news reader, as well, which is nice. See the Soapy the Chicken Feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoapyTheChicken

Here’s the blogger feed to compare it to, if you’re interested:

http://soapythechicken.com/feed/atom.xml

The blogger/feedburner combo is definitely the slickest free solution for cartoonists to syndicate themselves on the web that I’ve seen.