Hello, everyone!
We have some nice pipin’-hot updates for you! Most of them are site-based, but still very important! Let’s read on!
First, a cosmetic change: we have switched to Glide.js for our carousel on our home page! Basically: what makes the slider on our home page look cool!
We had gone with Bootstrap’s carousel slider, but for the longest time, the code was a mess and the carousel sometimes would get “stuck” loading. At times, it would also not be easily “read” in terms of usage. We saw Glide.js as having very simple code (the space cut down by a lot in the backend!) and very easy and visible controls—so we switched! Now it will be easier to peek at all the banners for our comics!
Unfortunately, despite compressing the images and using "lazy load" (which helps images to load faster on websites), the images still load very slow. We’re not sure why—we have tested it across two browsers, and the last thing we can think of is perhaps an issue of bad internet connection. That said, we'll still be trying to fix this issue, so the images can load quickly for EVERY WEB CONNECTION!
We have recently welcomed two new members to the collective: Handspike with Magical Heroines, and Alyssumily with Dream Circe Magica. You may recognize Alyssumily’s characters and/or style from her entry in ARADIA BEAT, which features some of her characters in a 1990’s AU!
We have also added the comics and creators to the prospective place in the pantheon. Please give them a magical welcome!
Lastly, we have finally created our resources page! It’s very sparse, compared to many other resources sites online, but we wanted to link to all the most relevant things for an initial setup. It will always have new things added, and while we'll make sure to announce the additions, please browse through our current selection!
A. Our affiliates page has apparently stopped working, despite everything on the backend still functioning. Renaming the file as well as making a new page from scratch does nothing, and checking across different browsers gives us the same result: nothing. Just a blank space.
We are trying to see what has been the sudden issue but we'd like to apologize to our affiliates and viewers for the sudden "404"'d status of the page!
B. We will announce this to the general public soon, but in case you missed both the Kickstarter and our TCAF “debut” of these two books in digital form, ARADIA BEAT the magazine and merch catalog are now available to buy on itchio! (Including the free print-at-home paper doll!) We have not put up the physical version up for sale yet, because there are still people who have yet to give us their information for their backer or contributor copy. Once the dust has settled for sure, and we take count of the remaining stock for all books and merchandise, we will try to put them up on the itchio store!
C. We have been sorely lacking in updating our database after the initial debut of pages and announcement back in December of last year. For this purpose, we have decided to create a roadmap page, dedicated to listing out the future comics we’ll be researching and archiving! (In “groups”, so it will change ever so often.) We have also decided to create an account over at Internet Archive, in order to expand the true nature of “archiving” beyond our written database! Since you can also create lists on the site, we have made a couple for you to peruse already!
This bit of archive news has not been announced to the greater public yet, and we hope to announce it + the roadmap once we have uploaded one or two archives onto IA proper!
Remember to tell your friends about us too! In this proto new age of Web 2.5 or 3.0 (or whoever next decides it’s 4.0 instead), our reach has been decimated by the general internet shenanigans. We want to make more people aware of our efforts and our collective. Any little boost helps, and if you want, feel free to download and print our free flyers to share at events or places like libraries and zinester-friendly places! Here are our flyers, along with the ones that’ll look nicer printed.
That’s about all the hefty updates we have for you! Please let us know if you think there’s something we should know about or have forgotten. Thank you for reading and for being subscribed!