Lor'Avvu

On The Subject of This Web Site and Its Limping Doppelgänger (at maxeem.com/loravvu)

Well, there are WordPress plugins and there are WordPress themes and then there are incompetent users that destroy the functionality of such elegant creations.

In the process of totally customizing the Lor’Avvu web site under Comic Easel’s plugin, but scavenging this theme from the first Lor’Avvu site I made under Comic Press, I somehow managed to break a single part of the PHP. That part is the Comic Easel plugin’s ability to keep track of comic posts and archive them as common entries.

(This is something Comic Press was not quite as apt at.)

So while everything else works beautifully, and I’m not entirely sure how I even threw it all together, the navigation will not appear as a predictable calendar like most other web comics that manage to function without such catastrophe. Instead, it is limited to browsing at large by Chapter drop-down menu.

Until I figure out a remedy, you will have to be happy with the nefarious consequence: the drop-down menu brings you to the first comic of each Chapter, and that is presently the only way of navigating the comic aside from blind selection of titles under a Chapter.

Since there is presently only one Chapter, this should not be an issue and the entire point should be moot. But I felt like I needed to do something. So here is a post about my stupidity.

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Update the next day (July 24, 2013):

After some more searching I think I discovered that the real cause of this “problem” is the way Comic Easel is designed. It doesn’t automatically parse the posts and organize it in book form, though the amazing Philip is working on an update/feature to amend this.

I tried re-installing everything on a parallel WordPress installation (hence the mysteriously clusterf***ed www.maxeem.com/loravvu) and went through some options to see what was leaking clusterf***ery into my main WordPress site here. To my eventual relief, I recalled almost precisely, well not exactly, but almost thoroughly vaguely what I did wrong. And it was to remove the permalink function from the names of the comic posts. Hence, a date correctly brings up a reference to the title of the comic, but nothing more. Duhhhh. 😐

This renders the calendar function I wanted like a smarter than average bear wants a pic-a-nic basket devoid of any sandwiches. It’s like flipping the wicker lid and discovering empty wrappers carefully labeling the formerly delicious missing contents.

Then I realized I don’t really want a pic-a-nic basket or a cal-a-nick-dar in the first place. I just wanted Comic Easel to be an extension of my brain and physically construct my fantasy organization if I found the right enigmatic check box lurking somewhere in the admin panel.

This made me realize I probably would have been dissatisfied with less. So in time, I will just build a nice page organizing the book manually. Which will probably be — proretroactively — for the best.

Alright already, enough about the abstract interactive art side. Next art post will be about something visual.