Blue Milk Special

Chewbacca sometimes comes across as comic relief, but maybe we’re just not giving his character enough respect. And to be fair, maybe Wookiee brains are located in their stomachs?

Canadian web developer, Luke Towers, answered our “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi!” As discussed several months ago on our blog, the site broke when ComicPress stopped being supported by the original developer and WordPress, the frame work which holds this site together was overdue for an update. When a WordPress update was forced on us, it no longer worked with the old version of ComicPress and we had to spend a lot of money and time getting things temporarily fixed. A full, long term fix, would be to switch from ComicPress, to ComicEasel to display the comics. Thanks to reader support, the costs of the work have been manageable, although the fact we do this project out of our own pocket always puts us in a precarious position as to whether we can afford to keep going.

We planned to save up what we could and wait for our regular web design team to be able to squeeze us into their schedule. However, the temporary fix broke sooner than anyone expected, and we took Luke Towers up on his offer to come to our rescue. Luke was able to start work on the migration from ComicPress to ComicEasel immediately. After moving everything across, Luke had to fix a couple of URLs, but everything should be working perfectly now. It was no small job, considering we have close to 750 webcomic strips and a lot of pages and links to cross check.

Fortunately, one of the perks of working on Blue Milk Special and building the audience for the last 7 years, is that we meet a lot of people with a wide range of skills. Luke Towers builds and maintains a significant number of WordPress powered sites as a part of his daily job for over two years.

“I think I may have discovered BMS a couple of years ago,” Luke told us, “but I didn’t really check it all that often. I recently rediscovered it a couple of months ago (probably around the time the Battlefront beta was first coming out), and spent a while reading through some of the archived storylines.”

Although the site design looks almost exactly the same, the navigation has been improved to include the ability to skip to the next or previous strips using the right and left arrow keys of your keyboard. That’s a pretty cool addition and makes jumping through the strips that much easier.

As far as the migration went, there were a couple of interesting issues to work out, mostly due to inconsistencies within ComicPress. Some words from Luke:

I wouldn’t say that it would necessarily be the easiest undertaking in the world for a non-technical (i.e. able to go in and modify files with confidence) person to do by themselves just because of the issues that can crop up with technical differences between ComicPress and ComicEasel. The general migration process isn’t that difficult to do, but the problem lies in nailing down the bugs that occur during (some comics not migrating initially because their filenames contained HTML entities instead of the actual characters, theme breaking in multiple locations due to differences in how it’s displayed).

In regards to ComicPress vs. ComicEasel, I would say that ComicEasel is a better system if only because it better integrates with WordPress in general (custom post types and featured images instead of implied association between regular posts and files uploaded to folders on the server).

Luke has been involved with computers in general and software / web development since he was 10.

“Probably my earliest Star Wars memory was finally being allowed to watch Episode IV for like my 8th birthday or something like that. I remember that my Dad would occasionally reference it, and I’d see the toys and whatnot for it so I was excited to finally watch it that night. After I saw it that first time, I loved it and became honestly a bit obsessed. Whenever I’d go to the library I’d borrow lots of Star Wars EU books. It got to the point where my Dad stopped wanting to hear anything about SW at all (he says I wrecked it for him, I say he’s over dramatic 🙂 ). I’d say that my favourite series from the EU would definitely be the X-Wing series by Michael A. Stackpole & Aaron Allston.”

As a webcomic reader, Luke also enjoys Gone With The Blastwave. You can check out the webcomic at the link.

If you’re looking for a website, or help with your wordpress then contact Luke Towers Web Developer and let him know we sent you.