Today is doubly exciting for us. Not only has twolofbees.com been up and sharing our artwork and scribbles with world for a year, but mim and I have also been sharing our lives for two whole years. By now, our relationship should be walking, talking and making mischeif with knobs on stereos and DVD players.
In case it's not obvious (or you're viewing this in an RSS feed), we've chosen this special day to push forward some changes to the website.
First up there's the gorgeous banner you can see above if you're viewing this on the 12th, which is mim's first one. For your convenience, here's a breakdown of the rest:
Pages
- Home - The home page has received a massive revamp with a big focus on our more polished stuff. There are links to featured comics, our favourite tags, the artwork that has been most loved, and a view of the artwork page that shows only our "finished" artwork and photos (in the hope that new people won't see Hideous Mim on their first visit).
- Updates - The new updates page is more or less the old home page. It's geared towards helping you easily find the most recently added content.
- Artwork - Artwork now has a "Scribble" type, which like the "Note" type, allows you to show and hide stuff from the Scribbles comic. You can also browse tags now by clicking "show all" on the tag list at the bottom of the artwork page. The artwork page now tells you how many images are being displayed and how many pages worth there are to flip through.
When viewing the popup preview of an image, you can click the love button without it reloading the page, and we've enhanced the preview to help remind you that it is just a preview.
When viewing an image (not the preview), the love button also works without reloading. In addition, we've also added some social networking buttons in case you'd like to share what you're looking at with your friends.
- Blog - Blog entries now have tags, and like the artwork page, and you can now sort blog posts alphabetically as well as by date. There are some social networking buttons here too.
- Comics - We've updated the comics page to be a bit more readable, and added RSS feeds for each comic (in case you love a particular comic but hate the rest of the site). When viewing a comic page, you can now see the image's description (if it has one), its details, what it's been tagged with, and click the love button if you like it.
- About - The about page has been expanded to include information about some of the tools and technologies we use in making our artwork and the website itself.
- Help - The new help page has information on how to use the website. If you're a regular visitor, go and check it out, because it also has a sweet glossary of some of our recurring themes and words (like "lof") complete with audio recordings. If you're not sure about these RSS feeds I keep banging on about, you can find some information on what they're for as well.
- Maintenance - Chances are you didn't see this, but whilst we were performing the site's upgrades, you could have seen this page. If you see it for any protracted period in the future, it means that something's gone wrong.
New Stuff
- Pea tips - We now have contextual help messages all around the site (as you can see, at the top of this page). These guys have some really helpful things to say, so make sure you check them out.
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Social networking buttons - As mentioned earlier, we've added in some social networking buttons using the free AddThis service. We're also going to be making a Facebook page for people to like in the near future (we're still toying with whether or not the like button seen when viewing artwork should be for the entire site or just for that image).
Content Changes
- We have a comic called Scribbles, which has absorbed most of what used to be flagged with the Sketch image type.
- The Car Doodles comic has been merged with the new Scribbles comic (it wasn't going anywhere on its own).
- Lots of images have been given a more appropriate image type (the relationship between Sketches, Finished and Works In Progress was less distinct before).
- We now have audio. Currently only on the Help page. We're really not sure at this point how they're going to be implemented into the rest of the site (the way they are linked to in the Help page is not likely to be final).
Additional Bug Fixes/Enhancements
- RSS feeds for comics
- Ref removal from page URLs
- Restructure internal data retrieval
- Fixed blog pagination bug
- Fixed misc artwork sorting bugs
- Fixed misc Opera specific layout bugs
- Fixed timestamp change on update bug
- Added maintenance page redirector
- Misc admin interface fixes
- New site background
That's pretty much it for now. We might be making a few minor changes here or there, but this is more or less the new site. We hope you enjoy it!
Happy lofversary to us and happy twolofbees.com to you!