We’ve all been spending a bit more of our free time over at the forums, which I originally though would be more of a trouble shooting / quick help area of the site.

I’m gonna bold the major points in this post, just in case you’re quickly skimming.

Since we’re socializing and goofing off, I figured I misewell have a little fun with it. I started some new off topic forums:

- Video Games

- Television and Movies

- Music and Audio

If you think there’s anything else we’ll chat about enough to deserve its own forum, let me know!

I sorted the existing off topic threads into those categories. I also sorted some others that were in the wrong comics category, etc.

I pinned the “Review Requests” thread at the top of the Reviews forum, since it’s a good one to have easily accessible.

For a bit of fun, I created some forum rankings based on post counts – so it won’t just say “New Member” or “Member” under your name anymore. They start off in increments of ten, but go alllll they way up to 20,000.

I don’t want to spoil the fun by telling you what any of them are. If you don’t like your current title, just stick around and it will change soon enough!

I’ll be uploading some badge icons to reward those with high post counts.

Also a big update, the editing interface is now more complex, with the ability to upload your own images. I personally liked the HTML editor, but it had some issues and required hotlinking.

But now every member has their own folder which they can upload images to – you can style your posts any way you like!

I added a New Forum Posts link to the sidebar, which you should see when you are logged in. It should help us keep up with the conversation (especially since I had to disable my email alerts so I could get stuff done!)

Let me know if you experience any bugs or weird formatting. The forum is a really complex plugin, so it requires a lot of careful tweaking. I’m happy to do whatever I can to make it easier and more enjoyable for you guys to use!

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Big things! Thank god for clever code. I’ve managed to take a few fun ideas and put them all together, making for a drastically awesome update.

Update: a couple more tweaks added.

Let me run down the list.

- Bigger Cover Images On Reading Orders

I re-sized the default thumbnail size and made a couple other sizes, so the reading orders and front page has nice big thumbs now. I also made some larger “thumbs” (actually 300 and 600 pixel auto generated images) for later use. Will probably come in handy for mobile stuff.

- Thickboxed Images On Reading Orders

This is awesome. I’m already having so much fun with it. Basically, now you can browse large covers just by clicking on the thumbnail, just like in the blog posts and database pages!

- No More Default Thumbnails

Bye bye gray boxes. I liked them, but we had to remove them to make way for…

- Amazon Image Backups!

Now, any book with an ISBN number will automatically query amazon for an image. This will work for thumbnails and even large images!

Awesome, right? This means when I upload those 3000 marvel books, about 90% of them will come with some kind of picture!

Obviously it doesn’t work for books without the ISBN, but it’s already made a difference for our Novel Reading Orders since they were all uploaded with isbn numbers!

- Preferential Treatment to Our Scans!

Amazon images are often wrong, low quality, or simply not the right edition (especially if I want to show all the same cover runs for a set of books, often Amazon just picks random editions to show the cover of.) This way, all I have to do is upload my own image and it takes preference over the Amazon one. Eventually, every book will be using our images, not Amazon’s (I like higher res scans and take some care in correcting.) but this way we’ll be able to upload a lot of content and have it look pretty good – plus, a book with an isbn number will automatically get an image added to it as soon as Amazon updates the cover!

- Image Pecking Order

Update: I wanted to figure out some way to display covers for books regardless of their edition, IE, SC, HC, or weirder. It works now – I created a conditional statement that pulls in this order:

TRO Uploaded Cover > Hardcover by ISBN from Amazon > Softcover by ISBN from Amazon > General ISBN (catch-all/older custom field) from Amazon > Gray Placeholder Image

So there should always be something on a database page or in the reading order listing. Even if it’s just the return of the gray box.

Sweet, right? I’m really excited about this. Until last night, I didn’t even know it was possible.

I also fixed some formatting, hover-over-image-title-display stuff, centering the find-book info on database pages.

I’ve still got some issues to figure out (wordpress is scaling down images to the new thumbnail size instead of using the generated thumbs, which results in jagged images and slower loading pages) but I’m pretty happy with this latest update.

I can’t wait to see how the Marvel list looks!

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A few of you have been asking about international links (especially Jonah X and Simon, who are in germany and the uk respectively, though I know there’s a lot more of you.)

I’ve just gotten them implemented on the database entries.

They’re not visible from the reading orders (yet?), but any book that has an isbn number now should have four little flags on the page, like this:

International SC:

I feel like these are pretty self explanatory. Nonetheless, let’s go over em. These are the four main non-Us countries with amazon affiliate programs I can use. There does seem to be possibilities for china, japan, and italy, but I can’t figure them out and I think they won’t actually pay TRO without a bank account in those countries. In any case, these were pretty easy to sign up for (the three EU ones all worked at once.)

There’s the UK, Canada, France, and Germany. Which conveniently covers a good chunk of our international traffic. I hope those links help people in nearby countries as well.

I did have some questions that perhaps you guys could help with. Right now, the “search” structure is the same for each link. They’re generated using the ISBN number, since titles are not reliable internationally.

But while the “books” category links seem to work fine for UK and CA, while it finds the right book, the FR and DE links seem to show error messages. Anyone know how I can fix that? Maybe my links are formatted incorrectly?

Let me know!

While doing this, I figured out a way to get cover images from amazon for any book I that has an isbn number. It’s possible we could use this to have 90% of the marvel books upload with covers.

What I want to figure out, though, is a way to have the default amazon cover replaced if I upload my own cover scan (because a lot of them are low quality or the wrong book.) I’ll get working on that.

I think I’m going to increase the thumbnail size to 75×75 pixels though, since that would match up with amazon’s default thumbs, making it easier to have a mix of both.

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In two weeks, I’ll no longer be at my day job.

Kind of crazy, huh? Definitely crazy.

I’ll be working with an ex-day job co-worker now freelance/our-own-thing coworker to hit up some local market creative endeavors.

But I’m also hoping to get some serious stuff done on TRO.

This site doesn’t really bring in anything, but it could, and I think it could without requiring any sort of paid access (ridiculous) or intrusive advertising. I’m interested in partnerships with targeted retailers, but that’s not my primary focus.

The main thing is affiliate links. Without directly selling anything, TRO performs the service of directing people to the books they want/need next.

Ideally with the minimum amount of pain and ideally easy to find low prices. Right now, only about 600 books on the site have affiliate links.

Those 600-ish books bring in about 80-100 bucks a month.

Up until this point, that money has gone right back out in hosting fees and the little excess contributing to the weekly giveaway costs.

But if I get affiliate links up on everything, finish making the lists look nice and increasing the site’s usefulness, it could theoretically bring in enough to make TRO actually worth my time.

Time to be investing in editing/writing reviews, archiving scan examples, and continuing sorting lists. The stuff that I’m really passionate about, for some odd reason.

Worth my time at minimum wage, or half that, perhaps, but enough to finance the project, at least. It’s an exciting prospect.

Pretty crazy, but within the realm of possibility.

It wasn’t my original goal – which was just to sort my collection and share the results – but the ideas have gotten a lot bigger a lot quicker.

Even if the material we are interested in archiving and discussing is only a small niche of our massive modern culture, I believe it’s truly important.

We’re focusing on the life’s work of thousands of amazingly talented individuals in an archival, enjoyably readable format. The collected edition is a big deal.

TRO has the potential to be a really amazing resource. I like to think it already is.

And I want to be open about how the site operates every step of the way. So that’s why I’m sharing all this with you guys.

TRO has started to be come a real community, with forum discussions and a steady stream of review submissions. Not to mention much needed advice. Some of you have also asked me about a donation button (and I guess I should probably figure out how that works very soon.)

I appreciate your friendship and help. It’s amazing to see this little dream take shape. The participation keeps me going.

The next few months might be a little bumpy as I do whatever I have to to survive – taking odd jobs, selling stuff I don’t really need, getting serious about selling my own art, trying to launch a separate local business – but TRO is a priority for me.

I’ll put whatever I can into it and maybe it will support me a little back. It’s worth a shot.

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You may have noticed a lack of new reviews last night (though hopefully you’re planning on getting in on the new giveaway!)

Here’s the reason:

I’ve gone through and made sure every DC book has the correct era tags! While there were a couple other fixes, the bulk of this update was Modern Age tags – 476 more books are added to that category!

These lists may not get that much traffic on their own, but are insanely useful in filtering. For example, many people want to read just Modern Age Batman. That list has gone from 175 to 315 books!

Remember, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with those filtered lists. Want to read just Green Arrow and Green Lantern in the Modern Age? No problem – just put “Green” in the character field!

If you’re having any trouble with the filter, or have questions, let me know.

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