No idea if this picture is actually included in any of these books – but I love that panel.

Anyway, I finished doing my offline work that I started last night. I can’t place too many books right now, because I’ve got to get ready to go to Beth‘s graduation (Savannah College of Art And Design 2010! Congratulations honey!) I did manage to squeeze these three “Greatest Stories Ever Told” style collections in, though.

The Greatest Golden Age Stories Ever Told

The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told

The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told

Hope everyone has a great Saturday! I’ll be back with more updates later tonight, hopefully. Depends on how long we stay out with Beth’s family.

1 Comment

So, in order to make the Modern Age retcon books dovetail more gracefully with their Silver Age counterparts, I’ve moved the introduction of Robin to just before the first Silver Age Showcase Book. This is mainly because the new Archive additions will include appearances by Robin just after Showcase Presents: Strange Adventures.
It’s a little odd, because the book in question, World’s Finest Comics Archives Vol. 1, kind of has one foot in the golden age, but I’d say the stories around 1956 could be considered early Silver Age work.

In any case, it would be weird to see Robin before he is re-introduced, and after some consideration I think it works best like this.

The books that have been moved are:

Batman: Dark Victory

Batman: The Gauntlet

Robin: Year One

Batman: Full Circle

Batman: Scarecrow and Two-Face: Year One

You can see them in their new placements on Page 4 of the Recommended Reading Order.

I know this doesn’t jive perfectly with JLA: Year One, but that book is a constant pain in the neck continuity wise and… well, you gotta break a few eggs.

Also tweaked:

The Flash: Born to Run (to be placed right after the introduction of Kid Flash in issue 110 of the Silver Age series)

Green Lantern / Green Arrow / Batman: The Ring, The Arrow, and the Bat (to line up with these other changes)

Comment!

So I’m about to start adding some more books to the Recommended Reading Order, because I can’t sleep. Seems I’m getting used to being up till 5 or 6 am to work on this website. Not sure if that’s a good thing (Beth would say definitely not!) but at least things are getting done.

I’m going to try going about this a little different. Previously, since I was also trying to add covers, tags, and other information to titles while I was adding them in, I was only able to add about 5 or 10 books in a day. It’s taking a little long, honestly – I’d love to have the main reading order complete and then just focus on tweaking and updating the books already in there.

As I’ve said before, they’re mostly in place in my offline document, just need to be added online.

So I’m going to just try to place as many books as possible in the next couple hours and see how it goes. I’ll just be working down the Unplaced Books list, instead of starting at any particular era.

Oh, while I’m making a post, I should mention this little Golden Age of comics article over at Comic Attack. It’s got a nice list of appearances at the bottom.

edit: oh darn it. It looks like I’m not going to be adding new books to the order tonight after all – it seems like there’s some stuff I can do to make it go even faster but it make sense to record the information for the whole order first. So I’m gonna do some more offline work, though I might dip in to do a little updating and moving while I’m at it. If I notice anything, anyway.

This is why I shouldn’t announce my plans for updating/web work before I start.

Comment!

Woo! The search is on!

Check out this google search for Batman: Hush on my site. As you can see, it is now properly linking to the book placed in order on the page it is ON instead of on the first page of the order. And it’s also got much more comprehensive listings!

Webmaster tools told me that prior to uploading the sitemap only about 40% of the permalinks were indexed. hooboy! Seeing as I already get about 70% of the traffic here from google, I’m wondering if I’m about to see a fairly large increase.

Hope the server can take it.

In any case, this should make the in site search work better, I think! I’m gonna try it out now (funny how you’re not going to see any time pass because this is a blog post).

… (this is to represent time passing while I test it, duh)

Hmm.. not quite better yet. Lets try refreshing the index at the Google Custom Search control panel.

…

tiny bit better. I’m going to try adding a “refinement” that users can select.

…

Ah, I just realized that I’m not seeing very good results on this because google has an older cached version of the first page of the Recommended Reading Order. Since the book I was looking for “Batman: Year One” was listed on that page, it was consistently giving me the wrong one. Trying it with “Batman: Hush” gives me similarly outdated results – they’re a page or two off.

This must be because I’ve been adding in books towards the start of the order and they are bumping this other books down – and google hasn’t refreshed the pages yet. I think I can set them to a higher priority in my sitemap and hopefully this will clear itself up in a few days.

Let me know if you guys have any feedback about how the custom search is working and if it’s helping you at all!

Comment!

(me, working on this website)

Now I’m waiting for the sitemap to update at google webmaster tools. It wasn’t that hard to make with the plugin, though I did have to paste in links to all the RRO pages by hand, since it doesn’t do pagination for some reason… if this works I should probably do the other lists as well.

Since I’ve got a minute, I want to mention some awesomeness.

Daniel Davis, mild mannered internet browser by day, is a fricking super hero to me right now. Him an Alex J. could start a TPBro justice league.

He emailed me letting me know how much he appreciated my work (always awesome to feel appreciated) and offering his help if I needed another OCD trade paperback nut on my side. I told him that besides letting his friends know about the site, what I need most is specific advice for books in the reading order.

The easiest way to do that is just by leaving a comment on the exact book that you think there may be a problem with – even if I disagree, I’ll look it over and reply and our public discussion should help other site users deciding where to place to book on their shelf.

So this is exactly what he did!

Daniel noticed that Batman: Hush Returns contained a page of pretty solid spoilers for War Games and an issue that takes place far after. I was only peripherally aware of the issue, but not at all of the spoiler sheet – and it’s exactly the kind of thing I like to know about!

After reading his comment, I agreed on his suggested placement. Book is moved and re-placed!

Oh, and since this sitemap isn’t up yet anyway, I went and updated Hush Returns while I was at it. So that’s one more book with a cover and all its tags, for what it’s worth!

Comment!