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Check back here for detailed information on updates to the reading orders or database, reviews by myself or any of the other site contributors, and general comic news we find interesting! You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for updates.

If you’re new here, you may want to know How To Use This Website. Alternatively, click on a reading order on the sidebar. The current pride of our site is the Recommended Reading Order for the entire DC Universe!
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By | Friday, June 18, 2010 | 6:18 pm | 0 Comments | Blog > Database Updates

Some little updates to the layout on my lunch break.

First, I added some User Control Panel links to the top right – now you can login and out, get your password, go to the backend, etc, all from the top bar in a little drop down. Not as quick as just typing it in on the sidebar, but it’s good to have a little redundancy in this area. Now you can get to those links even from the Forum or Search pages.

Second, I changed “Comics” which was the name of the category to be “Comic Reading Orders” on the top bar. There was room for it, and it explains a little more about what we’re about and makes the info really obvious. I might see if I can style that one to really stand out too – the lists keep getting pushed farther and farther down on the right, but I still really want them to be the focus of the website. It’s a tough game to play – because returning users will want to see whats new and what is happening right NOW on the site, so I need to put those dynamic widgets up there. Let me know if you think the lists should be closer to the top, but I really think it’s good to show a couple reviews and comments up there.

Speaking of which, they got a little more bumped down by the Recent Forum Posts widget – which I pretty much need cause I wanna see what discussion is going on there. Alex started a cool little project collecting DC Universe Music References and already has some impressive finds – bet you didn’t know that, did you? You  can if you pay attention to the Recent Forum Posts!

I also added 3 books to the (hopefully soon to be) Complete Listing of DC Comics Deluxe Hardcovers, Batman And Robin Vol. 2, Superman Secret Origin, and Batwoman: Elegy.

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By | Friday, June 18, 2010 | 11:54 am | 0 Comments | Blog > Database Updates

I’ve enabled WP-Supercache, so you should see a pretty significant speed increase when using the site. Let me know if you run into any weird errors, especially:

1. You make a comment and it does not show up.

2. You log in or out and the sidebar login does not show you logged in.

3. Any page that seems to have a formatting error that does NOT fix itself when you refresh your browser (sometimes a slower connection only gets half the page. Very rare at this point, but I’m still looking out for it.)

Known Issues:

The only part of the site that is NOT chached at some point is the feed. So everything else suffers some delay – conversation should be emailed to you instantly, but if you go to check the site to reply, you may not see the comment up there yet. This is normal, but kind of sad – the forum suffers especially for this.

I MAY be turning off super cache for the forum in specific, but leaving it on for blog posts (browsing goes a LOT faster even if comments suffer a bit.) Or looking for some seperate ajax or java related commenting system that doesn’t have the same issues.

Also, although the blog post may hit the feed almost instantly, it can take a little while to show up on the category page. Eventually, the dynamic home page will ALWAYS be fresh, but the category page, for now, is a little stale.

Same with the discussion sidebar, though I don’t really mind that since it just shows different comments on different pages – maybe not the most recent, but as long as it gets people interested in what you guys are saying, I’m for it.

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By | Friday, June 18, 2010 | 6:23 am | 0 Comments | Blog > Database Updates

Gotta crash now, but wanted to make a couple notes:

1. The directions/pre publish reminder isn’t really complete, but I added it back in. I don’t want it to take up so much space, but I do want people to understand what to do. will find a balance.

2. There is currently no thumbnail setting box for book entries, which seems to be the only thing missing that my sleep deprived brain can think of right now.

3. I’m probably going to take the entire main post box off of the book entry upload pages and just replace it with a “cover image” upload spot and maybe a little “MISC Note about this book” spot, since we only ever make one line notes about books anyway.

also I really really really really need to set up caching for the site again. It will speed things up a lot.

That’s it for now. This has been a crazy code filled night learning how to get all this custom post type stuff going.

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By | Friday, June 18, 2010 | 5:25 am | 0 Comments | Blog > Database Updates

This is only working at a very basic level, but if you go into the backend through the User CP, you can see all the different types of books available – they all have their own set of character tags, shared creator tags, and so on. So if you want to submit a book you can just click on that one and only the relevant tags will show up (instead of everything being bogged down with the review fields and so on).

I’m working on tweaking it more so instead of a big text box for the book submissions, you’ll just see the data fields and a place to put the cover (and maybe a small “note” field). And making it so it’s always laid out well for everyone, instead of in a kind of random drag and drop layout.

I’ll keep you guys up to date as I work on it.

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By | Friday, June 18, 2010 | 2:24 am | 10 Comments | Blog > Features

The site seems to be pretty stable, so I’m taking some time to work on the next big database update.

As part of this update, I’m trying to compile a complete list of DC Deluxe Editions – there’s a lot of info out there on Absolutes, but less on these. Let me know if I’ve missed any and I’ll add them to the post. I don’t actually own any of these yet myself, but people have asked about them on my site so I’m doing some research.

These are the books I’ve found so far:

And these ones are not DC Universe, but seem to share the format? Or are marked as such?

Know any others? Some don’t seem to come up when you search for deluxe books on amazon – even though they might be marked as such in the release info.

And about the format – is it much different from the regular hardcovers? Why is one thing Deluxe and another an Omnibus? Absolute is huge compared to these, right? I’m so confused about the way DC does hardcovers.

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