Adding Text and Comments

A picture may be worth more than a thousand words, but a picture and a thousand words are definitely worth more than just a picture, I say.

Do you know you can 'tag' text before and after your comic images? This makes for a lot of potential, as it's always nice to let the reader know what you, the webcomic artist is thinking. It may be a long rant, or a short comment, or a single word grunt, it's still that extra something!

And here's how you do it. As usual, me, I take my own website as an example so I can explain it better. ;)

1. First, if you recall, your comic images are always named by date (eg 20030910.gif) and put in the /workshop/comics folder.
2. To 'add' text, create a .txt file with the same name but with a .txt extension (eg. 20030910.txt).
3. In the text file, write whatever it is you want to say. HTML coding works, so you CAN do something like this:

   <p><i>Heyyy!</i>

   <p>I can do text now. Look at me Comment! Look at me Rant! <b>I'm the Queen of the World!!!</b>

4. Pop the .txt file in the comics folder together with the comics.
5. Trigger a normal update and there you go!

You can have as many txt files as you like, as long as they have the date combination (eg. 20030910) somewhere in the file name. But this does bring up a question though, how do you control which goes first?

The answer? The files are give priority dependant on filename. Therefore, 20030910a.txt is going to have more priority than 20030910z.gif!

If you look at The Jaded's Homepage you will see that I have three sections in each comic page:

1. The Title and Page Number
2. The Actual Comic Image
3. The Comment Section

Here's how I do it:

1. The title and page number, I write in a text file with 'a' appended (eg. 20030910a.txt)
2. The image I name 20030910b.jpg ('b' ensures it's under 'a')
3. The comment is another text file I append 'c' to (20030910c.txt). ('c' ensures it's under 'a' and 'b')
4. I treat these files as sets and put them in the comics folder everytime I add a new page. This way, there is always a comment, title and page number!

And that should get you going! Rant and Comment away!- and Happy Webcomicking! -Ping