Does anyone out there know anything about RSS feeds? I’d like to change up how the one for Theater Hopper functions.

If you check out how our feed is being displayed over at LiveJournal, you’ll see that there is an entry for every blog post along with a link back to the site. There is also a second entry for each comic, but with no image. Just the same link back to the site.

What I would like to do is somehow marry the two. I would like the first blog post to have the comic in it. So the order of the information would be the comic at the top followed by the first blog post all contained in one entry. Subsequent blog posts would be given their own entry without the comic image. Maybe if we added a link back to the site at the bottom of the post or somehow made a hotlink of the comic image back to the site, that would be a nice thing to include.

If you have any experience with this, please contact me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com.

Sorry, guys. No comic today. I tried salvaging my desktop and it’s been a slog.

Turns out I found my install disks and I called Dell to help walk me through it. The bad news is that it wasn’t registering the prompt to rescue the drive from the CD, so I ended up having to reformat my entire hard drive. It’s formatting as we speak, having taken the last 30 minutes to progress 3%. I’d be surprised if I didn’t have to buy a new hard drive when it was all over.

I can probably use my laptop to complete my work. But right now, I’m too tired to make it work. Henry was sick over the weekend and he hasn’t been quite right since. He used to sleep through the night. Now he’s wide away at 4:00 in the morning. That, coupled with the worry about my machine last night led to practically no sleep. I’m running on fumes.

I might try to update Friday, but we’ll just have to see how it goes.

All I know is that I’m glad I bought an external drive to house all my music, photos and video. I have a second internal hard drive for all the Theater Hopper stuff. So my original art will go untouched. But it’s a close call.

I’m sitting here thinking about how good things were for Theater Hopper last year. The books, the conventions, the success. This year has been a real struggle. I can’t help but think how much worse it could have been if I lost all my original artwork. I probably would have given up completely.

In the meantime, does anyone have suggestions for a reliable internal hard drive that I might set up my operating system on? Does anyone think I need to purchase a OS upgrade? The disks that came with my computer were from 2003. Thoughts?

First, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has sent e-mails or left comments in support of my computer problems. I’m getting lots of great feedback.

Truthfully, though, I’m having a little trouble sorting out what route to take and I thought it might be helpful if I offer you guys a little more information.

Right now, my desktop has two hard drives. One that is 120GB that houses the operating software and all the other software like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and the like. The second internal hard drive is 20GB, came from my last computer, was wiped clean and now only contains Theater Hopper information. I have a third hard drive that is external and houses all of my MP3s, photos and video. If I ever get this sorted out, I’m going to move all that Theater Hopper stuff over there, too.

I’m starting to wonder if my OS hard drive is starting to crap out on me. My machine is about 3 or 4 years old and I noticed it was making some strained whirring sounds in the last month or so. I’ve had one person advise that I replace the hard drive with Windows XP already installed and then bring over all the old software. This might be a more costly solution, but might be more viable long term if it is the hard drive physically failing.

Anyway, that’s a little more information to go on. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do, but maybe some of you who have left suggestions can take this information to help me devise a more specific course of action.

Thanks again to everyone!

Okay, here’s that second post I was talking about.

First, a little background…

As part of WordPress and the ComicPress theme running behind the scene and managing the archives, I have the ability to go back and add transcripts to nearly 7 years worth of comics. Transcripts, of course, being the written dialogue from each strips typed out and captured for posterity.

The advantage of submitting transcripts to the database is that it makes the archives easier to search. So if someone wanted to find out if I made fun of Back to the Future in any of my comics, the search functionality of the site won’t have to rely exclusively on key words in the blog posts and that individual gets more accurate results.

Here’s the problem: 7 YEARS OF COMICS!

So I was thinking that I would solicit you guys for a little help. Here’s how it works:

I’ve created a new page that lists each month since August 2002. Also on that page is a list of items I will trade you in compensation for transcribing comics. Everything from shirts and books to promotional DVDs and original artwork. It’s a good mix of stuff. Different items are worth different amounts. A shirt is equal to 3 months of transcriptions, a DVD might be worth 5 months.

If you’re up to the challenge, e-mail me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com and let me know what item you want to trade for and I will assign you the months to transcribe. We can work out the details from there. Availability on certain items is first come, first serve. So don’t wait if you see something you want.

With any luck, we can put this little chore to bed in short order and improve functionality across the site that everyone can enjoy!

Does anyone out there have any experience writing code for RSS through WordPress? I wanted to make a change to how the comic displays through the RSS feed and I need someone to double-check my coding before I attempt to put it into production and screw everything up.

If you have any experience in this regard, please contact me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com or leave your comments below.

While I have everyone’s attention, I need a little help with a problem I’m having with the coding of the Theater Hopper RSS feed.

I tried posting the code into this blog post, but Wordpress tried to make the code functional. So I had to take these screencaps instead.

This is code inside the Wordpress functions.php file. It’s what helps control the RSS plus other aspects of the site. This is the RSS comic display code as it currently appears:

Here is the code as I have attempted to update it:

In both cases, you want to look at the code that comes after “//foo” because that’s where I’ve made my changes.

Basically what I’m trying to do is take the code that displays the WHOLE comic in the RSS feed and place it inside a “DIV” tag as a background image. The “DIV” is sized to 265px tall – roughly half the height of the finished comic. Below it is another “DIV” with copy and a link instructing people to visit the main site if they want to see the rest of the comic.

I know I’m overlooking something small. A misplaced apostrophe, a comma or something. But I’m not familiar enough with PHP coding to troubleshoot it effectively.

Is there anyone out there that can help me with this, look over my code and provide suggestions? I would appreciate it!