To start with, I had some trouble with the last review for Showcase Presents: The Phantom Stranger – it wasn’t showing up right in the feed and was missing on the site for a few hours.

Sorry about that – it had to do with the problems I was messing with below. It’s fixed now.

I modified a plugin to allow me to paste links from within the site into my posts without it creating relative links (you know, like /../ in the link structure) which was driving me nutty. So that should speed up my posting a little bit.

I added a couple menu items in the backend for drafts and scheduled posts right from the dropdown, but only the other administrators (not you) can see it, so don’t worry about it.

I added a “top” anchor to certain templates on the site, which will allow me to put “back to top” links in blog posts as needed.

I changed the review layout to include creator information and top and “jump to verdict” links. Then I spent a significant amount of time converting the old reviews to this layout. I’m not sure if I can do a better system, since the code is hard-coded in each one to make sure they work in the feed. Honestly, I should probably learn how to make category specific feed layouts so I don’t have to do this (And just use custom fields like we do for the book entries), but I haven’t had time to look into it.

I wrote out all the code for the review template and put it in a txt file, to make doing each review faster since I don’t have to type it out again (dur). I need a better solution (some kind of txt snippet or canned code insert thing in wordpress) but haven’t found one yet.

Finally, I made the “Review” links on the reading order listings bold. Each review takes a lot of work, and I want that to stand out! It’s the place to go for extensive info on whatever book is there and should include some nice quality scans made just for this site. So we should be proud of them.

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It’s a little hard to do the database work and manage to write a review every day, but I’m sure I’ll figure out a good schedule for it eventually. And hopefully more user and guest reviews will allow me to devote more time to the database.

But it certainly seems that reviews are what people want – the response in terms of traffic has been pretty substantial.  Or maybe I’m just doing a good job sharing the pretty pictures.

Here are the books that have been updated with covers and publication information:

The Shield (had to scan this cover myself – not a lot of info available about these Archie hero collections online.)

Superman Archives Vol. 3 (If I ever get my hands on all the archives, I’ll have to do a better job with these cover scans – terrible lack of good quality images for most of them)

The Shazam! Archives Vol. 3 (Scanned this one as well – lucky I got a hold of these recently!)

The Golden Age Flash Archives Vol. 2

Superman: The Dailies 1940-1941

All Star Comics Archives Vol. 2 (Quick scan of this one as well – unwrapping mine from its dustcover protective thing reminded me that even the collection is almost 20 years old.)

The Shazam! Archives Vol. 4

The Golden Age Green Lantern Archives Vol. 2

Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Vol. 2

The JSA All Stars Archives Vol. 1 (another scan. Luckily my copy of this book is in great condition.)

That’s it for now. I’ll put some time into a review and some marvel work later tonight.

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First order of business for this afternoon’s update:

Congratulations to Duncanpr (Dan from Richmond, VA), who won the Joker Hardcover giveaway!

Dan, your book will be in the mail on Monday!

Next up, I’m pretty busy with working on the Marvel list offline, but I’m trying to do a bit here and there with what’s already up for DC.

I’ve added covers and publication information for the following ten books:

Green Arrow/Black Canary: A League of Their Own

Milestone Forever Book 1: Meta Fictions

Milestone Forever Book 2: Hardware Escape

Superman: Earth One

Teen Titans Spotlight: Cyborg

Enemy Ace: War In Heaven

Sgt. Rock: The Prophecy

Vigilante: City Lights, Prairie Justice

Sgt. Rock: The Lost Battalion

Sgt. Rock: Between Hell & A Hard Place

I also added the Sgt. Rock tag to his Showcase Presents volumes, because they were missing from his reading order list. I’ll have to double check the rest of the Showcase volumes to make sure they’re tagged.

As of this update, we’ve got covers on over 300 books! (around 350, I think.)

I’ve also fixed the design code so the little black border works around all the book covers on the timeline and individual database pages. Previously it was only working in blog posts.

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First, just wanted to remind you: This is your last day to enter the contest for the Azarello/Bermejo Joker Hardcover! Again, good luck!

A next giveaway will be posted tonight at 11:59.

Onto the updates and changes:

Sorry for the weird output to the feed (all the novels).

I had to take them all down and put them all up, but now they’ve got creator and other information in. Thanks to some help on the wordpress forums I’ve got custom taxonomy importing working (which is great news for the upcoming Marvel update!)

Book pages have been updated to show characters from the various lists. Now, most of these are not tagged yet, so you won’t see the results right away, but I think the Buffyverse books have the tags working, at least partially.

Like character, series information for not DC books is now possible, but it won’t really be in effect until Marvel is up – when we’ll need it pretty badly for events like Civil War and so on. Series information for novels is already working (so if you want to read the Kamigawa Cycle of MtG books for example).

Novel pages have been updated to show the placement notes instead of “issue included.”

Edition information now displays for books that have it, so information like Softcover, Hardcover, Oversized, Digest, etc, will show up below the other tags. These lists will display every book with that term, so they will be most useful when used to filter existing lists (like for a character or creator.) That functionality will be available eventually.

Formatting has been put in so that all the new lists have the header text displayed properly. I still need a solution for what to do when the system does not find an image file associated with a tag. I haven’t found one that works across all browsers. If anyone knows, let me know too! I’m getting sick of that empty space or broken image tag.

There is still a none issue with the sorting id (which is a value entered in the wordpress date field to allow the system to sort by it) not displaying correctly if the value is before 1970. This is a core wordpress bug, and there still isn’t a good fix for it. You might notice that all of the novels, for example, display a value based on the current date instead of their actual sorting id. Not much I can do about it right now, unfortunately – the previous hotfix doesn’t work in 3.0.1.

I’ve updated Batman: The Bat and the Beast (and placed it) in order to coincide with our review.

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Inspired by some conversation we were having on the DC boards, I got into tweaking the Infinite Crisis event reading order, and the surrounding books on page 14 or so of the DC Universe Recommended Reading Order.

Here are the changes I made:

Superman / Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
All Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
All Star Superman Vol. 1 (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
All Star Superman Vol. 2 (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
Absolute All Star Superman (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
Robin: The Teen Wonder (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
JSA Classified: Honor Among Thieves (moved earlier so as to conflict less with books near event climax)
JLA: Volume 18: Crisis of Conscience (Moved into event.)
Superman: Infinite Crisis (Moved into event, corrected title.)
Robin: Days of Fire and Madness (Moved into event.)
Batman: Under The Hood Vol. 2 (Moved into event, corrected title to match cover.)
Wonder Woman: Mission’s End (Moved into event.)
Teen Titans: Life and Death (Moved into event.)
Outsiders: Crisis Intervention (Moved into event.)
JLA: Volume 19: World Without a Justice League (Moved into event.)
Green Arrow: Volume 7: Heading Into The Light (Moved into event.)
Supergirl: Candor (Moved up to be nearer to events at start of book.)
JSA: Volume 12: Ghost Stories (Moved up to be nearer to events at start of book.)
Birds of Prey: Perfect Pitch (Moved up to be nearer to events at start of book.)

All of these books have also been updated with covers and publication information. The appropriate books have been given the Infinite Crisis tag.

This is one of the harder events to read in trade, so I expect to be revisiting this again when I’m reading that area of the shelves.

I also added a cover and publication information for Cosmic Odyssey, just cause I was talking about it with someone.

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