Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
About
Archive
Forum
About
Archive
Forum
Comic strip for September 20 2023.
PANEL ONE: Erlak faces his champion. ERLAK: Well, anyway, enjoy your mount. I have to return to the mountains of the gods now, but if you ever need anything you may call upon my services. PANEL TWO: Erlak disappears. The giant rat stares at the champion. PANEL THREE: The giant rat looks around. The champion stands awkwardly. PANEL FOUR: The rat continues to look around. CHAMPION (thinking): I suppose it would be inappropriate to call upon him to find me a different patron.
September 20 2023

Hm. Okay. So the temporary kludge I'd worked out to get these commentaries associated with the strips (along with the title text for the images, and the invisible transcript of the strips that's only there for search engines and screen readers) was going to stop working today. The reason for this is that the kludge involved putting all of these snippets of text into an associative array, with the day of the month as the key... and of course today is the same day of the month as the first day of the strip. (Different month, but same day of the month, the 20th.) So that meant that if I wanted these commentaries (and so on) to keep showing up correctly, before today I had to either finally get around to putting all the text in a MySQL database that the site could read them from, or adjust the kludge so it takes the month into account and not just the day. In the short term, the latter course would have been easier, but nah, I figured it was about time I did it right.

I didn't start on this till... much later than I should have. As in yesterday evening. Now, this wouldn't be a complicated project for an experienced PHP programmer, but my PHP is very rusty, and I never really knew it well in the first place. Still, I managed to get it done. I kind of got it in just under the wire—I got the code working by around 10:30 p.m., and then it took me another half an hour or so to use the new interface to get all the text into the database. (Could I have written something that would have automatically read the data from the associative arrays in the PHP file and put it in the database? Eh, yeah, but with my poor PHP skills I'm not sure that would have taken me any less time than doing it manually.) It is done.

So, while before to add the commentary (etc.) for a new strip I had to edit the PHP file with the associative array and then upload it to the server with FTP, now I just log into the new admin page and put the text in a form. (The admin page is very ugly and messy, but it works, and since I'm the only one who's ever going to see it I'm not particularly concerned with the æsthetics.) This is a big step forward, and it's... something I really should have done weeks ago.

Anyway, I've still got to make the site mobile-friendly, and get the archive and cast pages working, and put the calendar in the sidebar, and of course find those missing files for the October strips, so... it's not like I don't still have a lot of other work ahead of me. But that's one task out of the way.