Ye Olde Towne Pub

Please excuse me while I brush off the dust.

Ye Olde Towne Pub has moved.  Yeah, for the 3 people that actually check this site (including me) it probably looks strikingly similar.  The look and feel is pretty much the same as it has been for the last few years, there are no new strips.  But the behind the scenes stuff has been updated significantly.

For one thing, we changed web hosts.  Why?  Well, I was paying $25 a month for business class hosting.  That was fine until my wife was laid off from her position as a junior DBA and we decided that we had to cut back on some expenses, but I didn’t want to give up the site.  Now I’m paying about $45 every 6 months.  So yay for that.

For another thing, we’re now using Word Press to drive the news posts on the front page here.   Word Press is pretty much the standard for the majority of blogs.  It’s very slick, powerful, and most importantly, very free.  The old site used a custom developed interface that Dave mostly wrote, and I tweaked from time to time.  This is way better.  Unfortunately, it means that all of the old news posts are gone forever.  Fortunately, no one cares.

EDIT:   HI THIS IS DAVE.  I WAS ABLE TO IMPORT ALL OF BOB’S OLD RAMBLINGS INTO THE WORDPRESS DATABASE.  THANK GOODNESS! NOW BACK TO BOB!

EDIT: HI, THIS IS BOB.  DAVE NEEDS TO LEARN ABOUT PERSONAL SPACE!  WRITE YOUR OWN DAMNED POSTS, DAVE!

Finally, you may notice that “the bar” is gone.  That used to be the old forums that we hosted here at TP.  They weren’t much used by anyone.  At all.  Ever.  Well, except for the many fine spam bots advertising gambling and porn sites.  I apologize to those of you who will now need to find your donkey porn links elsewhere.  In the mean time, my friends and family can find me on Facebook, which I update several times a day.

So, what can you, the humble reader (who is probably me or Dave) expect from the new Towne Pub?

Good question!  Unfortunately, I don’t know.  As you can see if you check the dates on the most recent update to the strip before this, it has been years since I’ve added anything to the site.  This is because I am lazy.  Also, because I work full time, and my kids are now at the age where they pretty much need to be driven to or from somewhere basically every day of the week.  That and I am still mostly addicted to WoW and raid several nights a week.  Finding time and motivation to work on the strip is difficult.

On the other hand, I have been considering a reboot of the strip for some time.  I’m attached to the current storylines, but it would take me literally years to wrap everything up and tie up all the loose ends.  I would really rather get back to semi-regular updates of 3-4 panel full color strips, punchlines and simple, short storylines like those int he first couple of months of the strip.  I also love doing full comic page layouts.  I’ve also recently redesigned all of the major characters and like the results.  Dave is on board for providing his expert coloring skills, too.  Who knows where we’re going with all of this?  Not me.

Now that Word Press is our blogging engine of choice, however, updating the front page here is about a billion times easier than it used to be, so I’ll probably start using this as an honest to goodness blog.  I was getting sick of trying to cram all of my thoughts into 400 character Facebook updates anyway.  So, for those that care (Hi, dad!) you can stop by here occasionally to see if I have anything to say about anything.

In the mean time, we (and by “we,” I mean “Dave”) have a lot of work left to do on the site to get the plumbing working behind the scenes.  Thanks for reading, and TTFN.