I guess I can see why no one has commented yet. A blank comments sheet is like an empty canvas — although my idea in implementing comic commenting was to create a more relaxed spot for people to talk about things (y’know HCI thangs), outside the rarefied air of our serious articles. Um, so everyone, have fun!

Kevin in Serpentor voice: I command it!

I really like the sky in the first frame.

(You asked for it.)

Interesting. I guess if you try to force conversation you end up talking about (virtual) weather… Anyhow, looks like it might rain in the next strip.

Yep. Sure enough.

All this just made me think of an interesting idea. What if a comic strip that was set in a specific city had a backdrop that was fed-in from realtime weather data in that city? (i.e. the appropriate amount of light coming in cartoon windows, and cast on cartoon buildings)You could visit the strip and get a real sense of the lighting atmosphere in which the characters live.

I wonder if CSS can help…

I seem to recall a blog which had different header banners which reflected the weather of the city the blog author lived in. I don’t recall the address and even if I did, the feature may be down. I don’t think it’s be that hard to do except that your character lighting wouldn’t match.

Well it’s a non-trival rendering task… to do it right, the comic would need to be constructed from 3d character models pressed out into cell-shaded form. Then the shading could be adjusted to fit changes in the lighting.

The overall effect would really be something, since the mood of the scene might change dramatically based on these external stimuli.

The blog you mentioned is 1976design.com, Dunstan’s blog.

http://www.1976design.com/blog/

YES! That’s the one. Thank you Kelly.

How did we get from badly redesigned hospitals to weather?

One could probably make a joke about “feeling under the weather”…

I don’t know whether we could weather through an “under the weather” joke.

(It’s unfortunate one can’t convey a deadpan expression online)

I don’t know if this applies to others, but for me this thread was harder to find than the usual ones after your articles. I only ended up here because it already had enough posts to appear interesting in your “active threads” list. You might be seeing fewer posts just because it isn’t part of people’s usual flow through the site.

Paul has a good point. It would be nice to have access to all current discussion threads from one place, regardless of where they start.

Chaps, I’ve just noticed that the Next> button in the toolbar doesn’t grey out when one is looking at the last cartoon….

Chaps, I’ve just noticed that the Next> button in the toolbar doesn’t grey out when one is looking at the last cartoon….

Well spotted. I’ll get Tom right on that!

Paul has a good point. It would be nice to have access to all current discussion threads from one place, regardless of where they start.

I’m not sure this will solve Paul’s problem specifically but we are going to overhaul the archives page to include quick links and posts. I will probably add comment count in there as well.

Paul’s point is more regarding the “usual flow” which is totally valid for existing readers because they are not accustomed to looking under the strip for a comments section. I can live with that being simply a point of adjustment - such are the risks of redesigns unfortunately and also why creating huge paradigm shifts between versions is dangerous. Thankfully, we’ve mostly been rather incremental in our changes.

Yeah, that happens any time you change an interface

I guess only Paul knows exactly what he meant, though I believe you are right. What I’m saying is that if there were a central point where people know they can see all of the existing threads then his problem goes away, people will see the strip threads (and if you create a zero entry thread whenever you create a new comic it is even more obvious). At the moment the only “central point” I can find is the “Active Threads” block on the front page, and naturally nothing appears in there unless it is…err…active.

Assuming everyone gets used to using that central point of course.

I agree that with time people will get better at finding the comments link under the strip. But I claim that it’s not just learned behavior, and that the layout of the page encourages that link to get lost. My point was not just that site users “are not accustomed to looking under the strip for a comments section” as Kevin said. It’s also that, at least for me, reading a graphic strip and reading a paragraph of text are very different experiences. The paragraph is, significantly, all words — it has the same format as a conversation I could join. When I finish reading it, there’s another single word, in bold and color, saying either “Read>>” or “Comment>>”. I’m immediately invited into a conversation about the paragraph.

On the other hand, when I finish reading the strip my eyes NEVER move automatically to the collection of words and links below it. I’m not thinking in “text” or “conversation” mode at that point, I’m thinking “graphic” because that’s what I just read. I’ve completed that task (reading the strip), so to find the next task I jump down to the next major header I see, either the ad or the header on the weekly essays. I’m half aware that I’m skipping text, but it’s all pretty small — probably legal stuff or links I don’t care about (which turns out to be mostly accurate. The only links I do care about there are the next/previous ones, and then only if I’ve missed a week and want to go back to read it, so I’m doing a different task and I know where to look). The comments link never catches my eye the way it does in the paragraphs, so it never occurs to me to go read that thread.

I don’t have a specific solution in mind, and I’m not even sure it needs one. The current link and the list of active threads is fine, but will probably see less use than the other discussion threads. If you want to have a specific invitation right next to the strip, my recommendation would be to make it a graphic link, preferrably just to the right of the strip.