- Table of Contents
- Thoughts at 3:00 AM
- Letter Column
- The Death of Superman: A Writer's Escape
- Death and the High Cost of Comics
- Crisis on Infinitre Worlds #1-3
- The Post-Crisis Crisis
- Ty Templeton Interview
- Getting to Know Mark Gillins
- DC Advertisement Challenge Results
- Costume Redesign Art Challenge
- Crossovers & Team-Ups Writing Challenge
- Brainstorm's Corner: Guy Gardner
- Choices, part 12
- Go, Johnny, Go, Go!
- The Hammer of Hell
- Sector 2814 Art Gallery
- DCU Digest
- Superman 101: The Man of Steel
- HOJ: Dan Garrett, the Blue Beetle
- JLA #37 reviewed
- Top 12 Reasons To Keep Dead Heroes Dead
- Batman-Toyman & Day of Judgment
- Senseless Stats: The DCU Afterlife isn't so bad
- Back Cover & BOF Award
by editor … I forgot my name
This Month: Thoughts on the Fanzing site revamp…A
Bit of Publicity For Us!… Personal stuff…A Fanzing Staffer has a new
Web site!…Results of last month's Quizlet
Well, Fanzing was pretty late this month. It's almost time for me to
begin slaving away on the next one. But after this, things should settle
down.
Last issue was late because the Fanzing Special Report: How To Save the Comics Industry grew to be HUGE. THIS issue was late because most of October has been spent revising the site. In case you haven't noticed, we have all-new navigational buttons (courtesy of Bob Riley) and background graphics from several contributors, including Benjamin Grose, Jeremy Greene and Erik Burnham. I've also removed the front entry screen, making the frames version the default page, and combined the cover and table of contents pages into one page. These two changes reduce the number of "clicks" it takes to get into the current issue from four down to two!
What else did I do? Well, after changing the navigation for all pages created using the new nav system, I decided it was time to make this the same across the board. That meant replacing the old nav bar on issues 1-11. THAT was a chore. Then I decided to get all of the colors to be non-dithering and fixed as many of the dithering colors as possible. I also changed the nav bar so that it works whether you click on the images or the words (previously, only the images worked). I added the background images to all existing pages. I put a lot of HTML coding in quotation marks, just to make it as clean as possible.
ALL of these changes were done to the 650+ pages currently on our server. I figured I HAD to do all the changes at once, since I sure as heck wasn't going to export ALL of these pages twice! Fortunately, I was able to change all the documents at once using Dreamweaver's Find-and-Replace function.
One thing, though. There may be errors in some of the older documents. I have no way to check ALL of them for errors. Therefore, if you see something that looks weird, please report it to me and I'll fix it ASAP.
I still have to export the rest of the Archived issues (1-19), but I'm going to hold off on that until after Thursday, October 21st, when I get my MediaOne cable modem installed. After that, uploading to the net will be SOOOOOooooo much faster!
NEXT ON THE AGENDA: I need to add keywords to all of the existing issues. After that's done, I'm ditching that stupid Hotbot search (it's never worked) and replacing it with a better search engine. Hopefully this will be done by December BECAUSE…
There will be a write-up of Fanzing appearing in an upcoming issue of Wizard Magazine! The write-up comes from Russell T. Burlingame, an occasional contributor to Fanzing, who now has an internship at Wizard. Unfortunately, Russ tells me that he commented about how hard it was to navigate this site (I was already doing the revisions to the site at the time…wish I had finished a little bit sooner!).
Russell doesn't know which issue it is for sure, but he's guessing it'll be December. I imagine EVERYONE will want to contribute something for our December issue?
Time is pressing for me. I'm spending way too much time at this damn keyboard and getting too fat! I wish I could say that not doing Fanzing would make a difference, but every other project I have to do involves spending time at the computer! Projects like:
- Fixing up our Amazon
page
- Doing a major revamp to my Elongated
Man site which still talks about John Broome passing away and was
last updated in 1998. I've bought a ton of Elongated Man comics to add
to the Elongated Man Appearance
List, too!
- Doing some revision to my
home page which talks about how I'm going to get married in May,
1999!
- Updating my Comic Books For Sale page. It's about time I added in the last year's worth of comics and put prices by all of them…but that's going to involve SOOOOO much work that it makes me tired just thinking of it!
- Writing fiction for Fanzing again. I miss doing it, and I have about ten great stories lined up.
- …And the big one: Submitting proposals to DC Comics. I swore that this was going to be the year I'd do it, but the year is almost 5/6 over and I just haven't found the time. Add to that, the fact that there isn't enough work in the comic industry to support the pros that are there and it gets very discouraging. But I need to try…if I can only find the time.
Chaim Mattis Keller has a new web site devoted to DC's sci-fi comics of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Star Hawkins and the Star Rovers. You can find it at: http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Cabana/4846/cmkeller/comics/dcfuture.html
Results of last month's Quizlet
| Q: I want to read Lobo vs…. (of 709 respondents) 
6% Superman
24% Impulse
12% Suicide Squad
20% Batman
13% Space Cabby
24% Spectre
|
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Now that you've read this piece, |
This piece is © 2000 by .
Fanzing is not associated with DC Comics.
All DC Comics characters, trademarks and images (where used) are ™ DC Comics, Inc.
DC characters are used here in fan art and fiction in accordance with their generous "fair use" policies.
Updated 3/7/2007