Kipper Sentinel edition

Kipper 2.4 has been released, with another new set of goodies: Kipper Homepage Sentinel for webcartoonists.

Sentinel feeds your homepage with your most current comic (dynamically suppressing future updates), creates a current calendar of the most recent updates, and includes an optional storyline dropdown.

There have also been some revisions to the navigation code. Works even better! Because of these changes, though, you may have to adjust your CSS some. We have accordingly updated the CSS for our demonstration templates.

Posted 22 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Kipper navigation update coming

...over the weekend, or by Monday morning. I found a couple of issues with the archive navigation that need to be addressed.

One change is simply a desirable improvement. Navigation buttons will now include the title of the pages as mouseover titles. This is not only a navigation aid, but a potential textual relevance boost for ad networks like ADSDAQ and Google.

Another change addresses (I'm afraid) an error in the basic navigation configuration. If you've had trouble making image-based nav buttons, it's because ahem I goofed.

I'm setting up a new site over the weekend, which I will use to test all of the various changes, so I can make sure that there are no more short-term issues to deal with.

Posted 13 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Kipper image upload and edit

This morning, pending a few last-minute tests, Kipper gets post editing and image upload functions.

Kipper can upload files to your website, regardless of whether you are operating it on your website, or from your desktop. After uploading the image, you can click to include it in a new post in the editor.

One poser for me was figuring out where to have Kipper upload the files. So that Kipper isn't running amok throughout the entire site, it seems like it makes sense to simply look for an image folder within the final pages directory. That way, when you post, you know that your images will always lead to something like images/newpix.jpg, instead of constantly backtracking to upper level folders.

So when you click the "image upload" option, you are presented with a dropdown of all the folders that Kipper finds within the pages directory, including the top-level pages directory itself. This might be too limiting for some users, but it's the best way I could figure out to keep things sensible and manageable.

The editor is, your choice, a feature-filled TinyMCE word processor or plain text. In fact, since TinyMCE is so large compared to Kipper itself, I will probably have to direct users to download TinyMCE directly from the TinyMCE website. However, Kipper will function just fine without it.

I still prefer the plain text editor, myself. I figure I'm in the minority, though, so Kipper pulls up the TinyMCE word processor by default, as long as it's there. A click switches the editor to text.

Posted 9 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Easy menu tabs with Kipper

A tabbed menu that indicates the page you're on is easy with Kipper. We've just gussied up the Kipper site's vertical menu with this technique, and we may eventually do the same with Book Elves's main horizontal menu.

It's simply a matter of using a combination of the include and exclude tags. Like so:

<!-- ifnot:index:start -->
    <li><a href="index.php">Kipper home</a></li>
<!-- ifnot:index:end -->
<!-- if:index:start -->
    <li class="here">Kipper home</li>
<!-- if:index:end -->

When making the index page, Kipper excludes the first list item, and includes the second. This repeats for every menu item, and the behavior of the list is controlled by CSS. CSS class "here" simply changes the color scheme for that one list item.

With imagination, you could do much more than just change the colors. When you arrive at the destination page, the "if" field can include a submenu. Or a colorful graphic.

The entire Kipper menu is enclosed in a set of inclusive tags:

<!-- ifdir:kipper:start -->
    [...]
<!-- ifdir:kipper:end -->

That keeps the menu from leaking into the rest of the site, even when there are other pages with the same name.

Posted 5 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Kipper 2.01

A reasonably important update; several potential problems have been fixed, although none have as yet been reported.

And no bloat, at least not this time. The ZIP file actually shrank, some.

The interface control has been consolidated. Setting interface choices now affect all jobs; so if you set a particular color scheme, you don't have to keep changing it. If you change your good luck charm, it will follow you from job to job. Most importantly, Kipper security info now needs to be set only once for all jobs. Having this set on a per-job basis was a goof, now corrected.

Browser caching has been fixed. Good grief, Opera was even caching the login page! Apart from that issue, though, Opera seems to handle the page content on the screen more smoothly than Firefox.

Charm picks hold better with an automatic save, instead of you having to be prompted to save the job file.

And other fixes.

Posted 4 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

More errors fixed

There were some pretty bad formatting errors in my...page on formatting. Turns beet red.

I need to review the documentation to make sure it's caught up with the last of the changes I made. I swear, it seems like the documentation is more work than the script itself was!

Posted 1 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Feedback welcome

I'll post an open thread every once in a while. I like to hear what's going on.

I especially want to hear if you're having any trouble getting Kipper to work for you. I was pleased with an early 5 out of 5 rating at our HotScripts listing, but later someone voted 1, the lowest rating. A 2 would be a plausible "it sucks" vote, but the lowest possible rating and I've got to figure somebody couldn't even figure out how to get it to work in the first place. :D

My internet time is very limited, but when I am online I want to make myself available to help. Don't be shy!

Posted 1 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Kipper template foundry

Oops! I corrected a few errors in the recent templates I posted. Nothing serious.

But while working on the first four, I developed a good routine. There is now a real-life Kipper template foundry. It's a special folder on my desktop called "foundry".

This Kipper template foundry is a pretty good example of one variation of use for Kipper. I made a job file called "template-foundry" that is permanently set to that folder. It expects, every time, that the template is called "template.html", regardless of the name of the other files. And the site name is set to "Kipper template foundry", so that it will appear in the top bar of every display page.

This folder is kept empty, so that when I have completed a new template, or if I need to make a slight correction to a template, I can just switch the contents of the template's base folder into the "foundry" just long enough to forge the display page.

One click of Kipper.

Then all I have to do is drop everything back where it belongs, and make the ZIP file. For the template files, I don't bother with Kipper's upload functions. Since I have to upload the ZIP file anyway , along with multiple images and other files, I FTP what I need with a separate client.

Kipper doesn't yet have (and I'm not sure it should have) a file manager for uploading files outside of its current mission (making pages). Enough extra files, and it seems like it's just as well to open that FTP client. I'm not sure if I see a good reason to have Kipper emulate a full FTP client to that degree.

I could maybe see something that uploads images to just a set relative image folder, but then that seems too limiting.

The answer will probably come out of ongoing usage and feedback.

Posted 1 Feb 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Three-column templates

Trilateral and Trilateral Luddite: two more extremely simple Kipper-ready templates, showing how easy three columns can be with plain old table tags or advanced CSS styling.

Posted 31 Jan 2009 | 8:58 pm | View Comments

Kipper templates

Why don't I make some prefab templates for Kipper? Hm? Huh? Eh? Huh? Hm?

Well, OK then!

Here's the first one: Plain Jane, a very simple template that should make it easy to see how Kipper works.

And another: Button Nose, a simple template that shows how to make graphic navigation buttons using CSS.

I speak from experience when I say that using CSS is better than plain image tags for this purpose (even if the CSS intimidates you a little, at first). One day, after you've accumulated hundreds and hundreds of webcomic pages, you'll want to redesign your site. Using CSS, you can wildly re-arrange your navigation buttons by editing just the one stylesheet document, without having to rebuild entire archives.

For those who care about such things, both templates validate with W3C's markup validation service. The CSS, too.

Posted 29 Jan 2009 | 8:57 pm | View Comments