The Daily Blink

Chris here. I’ve got a very busy and exciting weekend in store and I wanted to share three different pieces of news with readers before I jumped into it. Here they are as follows:

New Website!

We’re far enough long that I feel like I can start telling people about the new Dailyblink.com website that we’re working on. Holden Hill, a gifted programmer (and good friend) has been working with me through some late nights to take a brand new design and get it up and running with some new features and a *BADLY* needed coat of paint. We also have taken lots of reader feedback from the life of the current site and used it to make sure that a lot of the suggestions that readers have made are being addressed.

To be clear, this is something that’s been at the top of my list since October of 2010. I looked at paying designers to rebuild the site, designing it myself and giving it to a programmer to finish, or simply doing the whole thing myself. During all of this I also went through one of the worst streaks of creative blockage I’ve ever experienced as I just could not pinpoint what the site needed to look like. It wasn’t until recent events like the Blink Bonanza and other milestones (holy crap, 6,000 Twitter followers!) that we realized that I was going to have to force the issue. Holden’s been doing a fantastic job shaping the more complex aspects of the site and we’ve already upgraded our server to handle the increased traffic we’ve been experiencing through 2012.

I can’t promise an ETA for the new site, or give you a preview, but we’re starting to get over the bigger hurdles and I can’t wait to start showing it off.

ComicPress!

Related, but deserves its own mention: We depend on Comicpress to help run our site. Simply put, it’s the best WordPress plugin/theme package available for publishing webcomics. It’s also been a bit of a quiet project as of late, due to there being only one developer left on the project, Phil “Frumph” Hofer. When we began working on the new site we started talking about the features we’d want to add, and sought to track down Phil to discuss them, but we didn’t have any luck. Starting to think the project was completely dead, Holden and I began sketching out a plan to branch Comicpress into a whole new dev project to ensure it stayed updated and had places for people to find support for the plugin.

However, right as we started giving the idea serious consideration, Frumph resurfaced and we discovered that he was back from his hiatus. Due to his stated commitment to keep the software updated (and our own realization that more than one giant side project at a time is probably a slow suicide), we’re standing down on this idea and focusing work on our own site. However, as a thank you to the huge amount of work that Frumph does for us and everyone else running on Comicpress, we’ll be working with him to see about the features we develop being added as standard to future releases.

More on this closer to the release of the new site.

Moving

Last but not least, I’m in the midst of finishing packing up my apartment and moving into a new place with my roommate. The biggest change? I am finally going to have a dedicated office! No more appearing on Legendary with a bed taking up the entire background! Better Twitch streaming setup for both myself and Jasmine, with lighting designed for broadcasting! And most importantly, no more spinning around in my desk chair and banging my shin on nearby furniture because this room is way too small for everything currently in it!

To our readers, I know I speak for myself and Mike when I say THANK YOU for coming back to the site for every new strip. Not only do you help make all of this possible through your support, but you make the effort we put into it completely worth it.

(And with that, I’m going off the grid*. See all of you on Monday!)

-Chris

*Smartphones don’t count, do they?