WordOwl

Passing 6,000 strips is a milestone, but not one big enough to justify an announcement on the front page, I thought, so instead I took a moment to reflect.

More specifically, I took a few minutes to examine the competition, Oh No Robot. I’m still hearing that it is the ‘better’ engine. It still has the same flaws I pointed out before in my comparison but I was interested to knwow the level of growth.

Since July 2008 when I took my snapshot of the figures for comparison, it has added about 5,300 strips to its archive. Sounds impressive, and it is - that’s the equivalent of most of the current WordOwl archive.

But hang on. What did I do in the same period… 2,600 strips. I’m a one-man band, and I’m doing them at half the rate of the crowd-sourced Oh No Robot. I have 1% of the number of comics but 6% of the reported strip archive.

Just suggests to me that most people either don’t care about Oh No Robot or feel annoyed they have to transcribe it themselves.

I’m still interested to note that the numbers available in the series list and the advanced search have hardly changed, despite the number of comics rising again.

If I were the maintainers of Oh No Robot, I’d probably take the opportunity to sit back and actually have a look under the hood. There are things that need tweaking, otherwise WordOwl is going to creep up on them. It’s doing that already.

If nothing else, they’re over-hyping themselves by saying “87,767 comics in 1274 series” (correct to now) when they only have ~650 ’series’ searchable, and only ~450 ’series’ that might be usefully searchable (i.e. more than 5 strips)

I suspect the number of strips (or ‘comics’) is exaggerated too. I believe the true number is probably closer to 70,000 strips, not nearly 90,000, but that’s just my skepticism.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rant. But my enthusiasm got the better of me.

Jumping from one of the more recent comics, in our last weekly review, to one of the older ones, we turn to Bruno the Bandit.

So, what’s it about?

Bruno the Bandit principally follows the adventures of Bruno Bunkleyutz and his micro-dragon sidekick Fiona, on his adventures of derring-do and adventure, set in ‘Rothland’.

Despite sounding like something Errol Flynn might have been cast in, Bruno isn’t your average highwayman or thief; he’s far too impetuous and doesn’t think through what he’s doing before he does it.

For example, stealing a gem from a statue in a temple is bad enough, but while there is a ceremony below at the time? Plain daft.

Bruno is supported in his (mis)adventures by a cast of regulars, his parents Eunyce and Ambrose, and is well known to the king, Xerxes. He also regularly deals with the 800-year-old wizard Maledict.

What’s the appeal?

Despite being a cad and a bounder of the first order, Bruno is that tragic hero we all love to read about. No matter how bad his exploits, no matter how big the job is, when it goes wrong (as it usually does, some way or another), we find ourselves siding with Bruno.

The real appeal is the way the strip looks at real life, holding a fairground mirror to it and watching the twisted reflection. This fantasy swords ‘n’ sorcery epic features all kinds of anachronisms, such as television and a form of Internet, for example.

A regular recurring feature is the idea of fame vampires and fame vultures, creatures who feed off the limelight, and those who go to any lengths to be famous, a perfect parody of some of the media’s current favourite people - usually the celebrities you love to hate.

Bruno grew up trying to be like his father, the best thief in Rothland, whilst supported by his mother, a “Warrior Hottie” in her youth, and showing no sign of rescinding that title despite being in her 70s. Despite being unlike anyone we would know, we can somehow relate to them on a deeper level.

Bruno’s enemies also make life interesting. Although he has had many enemies, somehow we always come back to the best ones; his regular foe King Xerxes, with whom he battled over the throne, and at the time of writing is battling with in civil war.

The most infamous of his enemies, though, is the wizard Maledict. There is something reassuring about there being an evil wizard. (There’s always an evil wizard, right?) And Maledict is no exception, being a great foil for many of Bruno’s schemes.

A number of the events shown in Bruno the Bandit do show a link to real world events in some form, although heavily altered to suit the fantasy world. Previously, for example, was a storyline about a land splitting off from Rothland to be independent. Although the strip had this down as being an Elf territory seceding from Rothland, it wasn’t hard to spot that something similar was happening in Canada at the time.

The ability to hold that twisted mirror up to reality is a tough one to pull off - but Ian McDonald manages it superbly in Bruno the Bandit. To make it regularly funny as well… even tougher.

What about its history, and its future?

Bruno the Bandit has been running for over 10 years now, making it very firmly one of the oldest strips out there, debuting in July 1998.

In that time we’ve been able to watch Ian develop his skills in writing and drawing and it is noticeable that the later strips are more polished than the earlier ones; the artist has honed his craft well.

At present there is a 3 strips/week update schedule, however it has been stated that this may drop back to 1/week as personal events intrude. Ian has made it clear that there is no intention to stop Bruno at any time, however real life events must take precedence due to infractions on time.

However, there is a bright future ahead; the current storyline is strong and there is plenty of material on which to base upcoming storylines on, especially since the 2,000th canon Bruno the Bandit strip is not very far away.

Closing thoughts?

At times it can seem daunting to lay the many layers of history on Bruno and his family, and at times this can seem all too convenient, however instead of being stifling, it actually liberates matters such that we’re not introduced to more new characters each storyline than we actually need, as it would only get more confusing.

What caught me about Bruno most was the ability Ian has to nail the situation in a perfect satire. Many of the events in the world that catch his eye end up beautifully mirrored in Bruno.

Great! Where next?

• Website: www.brunothebandit.com
• Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday at present.
• Created by: Ian McDonald
• My favourite line: there’s too many to choose from.

I just had to implement a change in the software. That sounds odd, doesn’t it? But really it is, at least in my mind.

I was laying down last night, mulling over Melonpool; I’d started to transcribe a few more last night, and added more strips into the ‘tag’ system.

For those who don’t know, strips are grouped in two ways; story arcs and strip groups. The former is used for things like Bruno and Menage a 3; where the strips run continuously together. Meanwhile, Cyanide & Happiness and Melonpool both use the latter, where strips are not run together necessarily.

Why do that with Melonpool? Actually, it’s quite straightforward. Although strips do run together, having multiple blocks called ‘One Shots’ never made a lot of sense to me. More importantly, there are strips that aren’t part of a story block but are bundled in with it as a result of being between the end of one story and the start of the next. This allows me to mark them up however the strip would best be represented.

What’s the problem? It works fine, doesn’t it?

Well, it does for now. C&H works great; there aren’t more than (currently) 21 strips in any tag. Not a problem at all. The first tag for Melonpool, “* One Shots *” currently has 99 entries but that is going to go up. Now, after a recent debate about subselects using Sphinx’s MySQL plugin got me thinking. That works on the principle of listing “Find me all the matches in your index from these rows (row1, row2, row3, row7)”

The guy was having trouble with 150+ entries, and I’m sure there will end up being more than 150 ‘one shot’ Melonpool strips.

So what I’ve done now is probably something I should have done a long time ago. (And, actually, for the strips in these groups, it’ll be faster. In fact, there’s no reason why I couldn’t actually silently switch Bruno & Ma3 to using them too and cutting the extra subsystem out entirely, but that’s another story as there is more work I’d have to do)

For those who know what Sphinx is, I’m using MVAs for this column; multiple value attributes. It’s like a magic column that stores multiple numbers.

It means the logs are cleaner for me to pick up any oddities, the search is faster on tags (and no slower anywhere else) and the entire codebase shrinks slightly.

What would I have to do to use tags for storylines? Well, first up I’d have to sit and manually tag every strip in Bruno & Ma3. 2180 or so strips in all, since tags are applied on a strip level, not like story arcs which are defined once.

I’d also have to upgrade the tag system to know what is a story arc tag and what isn’t, so it could display the story arc link at the bottom. But once I’d made the transition it’d run a ton neater under the hood.

I suspect that may be my next development in between more transcriptions and finishing off the upgraded search interface (although to be fair, this would have to preceed that, since this new development would actually cause me to rewrite some of what I’ve done already)

Still, it means I have code to think about, as well as transcriptions, and anyone who knows me knows I like code.

The best bit is that the migration of this - once developed and tested - was so quick it happened between two other searches and neither were impacted.

Current Mood: contemplative & contemplative

Right. It’s been several days since I posted anything on here, and the last thing was an article - the first Comic of the Week.

So what’s happening?

New Stuff

There is a webcomic I haven’t even started transcribing yet, despite having permission for it (Weak-end Warriors) because I’m still working on Angst Technology. After a blip with that, necessitating a post to the InkTank forums, I’m off again on that, cranking up another 40 or so transcriptions today.

I have already set out the plans ahead: once Angst Tech and Weak-end Warriors are done, it’s then on to Melonpool’s archive. After that, I have a couple of feelers out for the next comics I would like to add but it’s all quiet on that front.

Archive stuff

The to-do list currently stands at:

Angst Tech: 974

Weak-end Warriors: 126

Melonpool: 1520

Total outstanding: 2620 strips

In other news

In other news, I’ve been thinking. As any programmer should know, thinking is usually a bad sign. In this particular case it is, and it isn’t.

I was thinking earlier this week about the consistency of transcriptions from the earliest Bruno transcriptions through to the most recent ones, and I realised that I’d never set out the ground rules by which I transcribe, so end up taking a decision at the time.

As a result, I have started drafting up a ‘Manual of Style’ for WordOwl and will make sure everything complies with it (eventually)

Also, in other news, I see WordPress is hard at work on 2.7. I’m not looking forward to this. The sheer number of changes involved means I’m likely to be doing a whole lot of coding and testing shortly after it goes out, assuming I want/need to upgrade, simply because the theme’s custom (including code hacks), there are custom plugins, darn it I even customised the Write Post page with my plugins.

As a result it’s not going to be pretty rehashing that little lot.

Plans for the future?

I have plans. I have all sorts of ideas (see above; re programmers and thinking, and why it’s a bad idea. Discuss.)

Other than finishing the above comics off, I’m thinking about interfaces, providing custom-branded services and the like. For example, I am strongly thinking about writing a WP plugin that integrates with ComicPress so that comics that are hosted on WP/CP backends can drop in WordOwl search integration (assuming I’ve done the transcriptions, of course!) Right now this only applies to two comics, and one wasn’t actually interested in it (long story) but the technical requirements still may as well be implemented as this might later be of use.

Essentially that would be a reasonably straight-forward RPC interface with API keys provided to users. One API to query for the details on the advanced page, one API to make the requests, you get the picture.

Depending on which comics I end up with, and how many are represented from different collectives (right now, 5 from Keenspot (1 of which is also part of PixieTrix Comix) and 1 from Blank Label Comics) I might end up discussing being an official ’search partner’ somewhere. NB this is purely hypothetical and totally unrelated to anything that has happened. It’s simply something that might happen.

The other thing that has crossed my mind with surprising regularity is advertising - both ways, in fact.

Part of me doesn’t care about making money from WordOwl and would love it to remain free. The other part of me thinks there is money to be made here and would consider banner ads etc.

Then, of course, i have thought (briefly) about paying for advertising to get more people here. But then I realised that people aren’t going to come here just because, they’re going to come here when they want to search, and not any other time. We’re not a comics portal, really.

So that got knocked on the head pretty smartly, not that I could ever justify paying to promote something that’s (currently, and probably will remain) free.

And that’s even before I start thinking about copyright and all the issues therein. For now, I’ll simply work on getting the site better than it is now, and also start work on the much rumoured wiki. If nothing else it’ll prove invaluable for Melonpool, plus some of the clean-up work on Bruno that I need to do.

It’s now 3.28am here in Britain. I probably should go to bed.

Kicking off our Comic of the Week series, we take a look at the latest work from John S. Troutman, “Flat Feet & High Heels”, or FF&HH for short.

So, what’s it about?

FF&HH follows the adventures of John’s long-running detective character Basil Flint, formerly of the comics “Basil Flint, P.I.” and “Flint Again”, and his friends and family. Like all of the previous Troutman works, FF&HH can be found over at Keenspot.

The tagline from John’s profile for FF&HH sets the scene surprisingly well: ‘because the title “Dicks & Dames” sounded too dirty.’

Basil is a classical hard-boiled detective, but operates in Seattle, Washington in the present day. As the 2008 strips begin, Basil find himself - tangentially - on the small matter of a serial killer. As the last couple of months have shown, Basil found himself with an urgent need to find the serial killer.

What’s the appeal?

FF&HH is a very strange work, and oddly compelling: mixing serious crimes with humour is always best done delicately; many of the crime dramas I’ve seen use the humour as light relief in between the serious stuff, or as character development only, and as a result humour is often left out. But FF&HH manages to play the humour off against the serious stuff so that you can imagine these are real people reacting to a real situation.

That said, the strip does have a distinct gag-a-day pattern to it, but in a way that is inventive and creative and without ruining the more serious moments as Bad Stuff happens. The current storyline does actually have a very serious undertone to it, but the humour prevents it becoming moody.

The art style lacks the photo-realism of other strips, but the style itself is strong and clear. It’s also one that doesn’t have the sense of having something to prove, as other young strips do. Not that this is a young strip, nor a fledgling artist; John has been a regular at Keenspot since around 2000, and some of the characters date back that far too, in various multiverses.

The other thing I haven’t seen too much of in other strips is the commentary. Nearly every strip is followed by its own commentary. Sometimes it’s about the events unfolded above, other times it’s about meta-events that could very easily come back to haunt Basil and his supporting cast.

What about its history, and its future?

Well, FF&HH as itself only debuted in July 2008, on a 5/week update schedule, but John has recently added some of the previous strips, from “Flint Again” into FF&HH’s archives, fleshing out the back story even more for the characters and explaining, if in a slightly odd fashion, how Basil came to be a P.I., and what he’s doing in Seattle in the first place, providing even more detectivey goodness.

The strip runs Monday through to Friday, although John is also accepting donations at present, and has said that when the donation counter runs up to $100, additional strips get drawn. Presently, there are 2 more weekends’ worth of strips to be added.

Closing thoughts?

I’m actually quite lucky, really; I discovered FF&HH when it was quite young (I seem to recall it only had 5 strips when I first found it, and I approached John about FF&HH joining WordOwl a couple of days later), so I’ve been able to watch it grow forwards, then gather the backstory.

I can’t say much else; I consider this a definite gem in the comic world.

Great! Where next?

• Website: www.flatfeetcomics.com
• Updates: Monday to Friday, with additional strips appearing on Saturday and Sunday on occasion
• Created by: John S. Troutman
• My favourite line: “You’ll find, Miss Flint, that madness is not always a vice.” — Amanda Beaumont.

After much debate on the subject, I’m shortly going to be adding a new article series to WordOwl: the Comic of the Week.

Each week, on a Monday, I’ll post up an article about one of the comics available for searching here at WordOwl. It’s mostly a promotional thing, and it gives me a chance to say what I want to say about the comics in a way I wouldn’t normally get the chance to.

The other thing is it’ll get a mention on the front page, too, as part of the deal.

So, starting Monday 20th October, look out for it!

WordOwl is extremely pleased to annouce three webcomics that will be joining the search engine’s archives.

Many thanks to Barry T. Smith, of InkTank, for allowing us to also add his three earlier strip archives.

From the words of Barry himself:

Sorry, We’re Open: The Citadel is a comic book and gaming store run by the MacNeill brothers. It’s a childhood dream come true, at least for Owen. Since his brother Ian is the responsible one, he’s the one who loses sleep over the whole venture … but in the end there is nothing they’d rather be doing. [more]

Weak-end Warriors is a look into the lives of a diverse group of paintball players. These fun loving folks congregate every weekend at Pollock’s Ranch, a paintball field run by Roland. [more]

Angst Technology is the name of a computer game company. A small start up, the employees are all drawn together with the vision of creating truly kick ass games. The only thing stopping them is their vastly diverse opinions about what a kick ass game is. [more]

Already, the archive of Sorry, We’re Open is up and we’ll be adding the other material very shortly.

Bruno’s done. It’s 3.24am and I still have some chores round the house I should do before bed. More tomorrow.

Really quick update mode: ON!

Right, I did the two bonus stories this morning and ploughed into the current storyline of Bruno. Now I’m over 1/4 the way through, but had to go out and do stuff, and since I got back in several hours ago I just couldn’t get motivated up to finish it. Just felt so tired, you know? It didn’t help that I thought I’d have “just five minutes” with the classic legend Sim City 2000, and ended up spending about 3 hours on my city…

I have 36 strips of Bruno to do and the plan is to try and do them now. It’s gone midnight and I’ll see what I can finish whilst going to bed at a reasonable hour. Otherwise I will finish them up tomorrow morning when I catch up with tomorrow’s Cyanide & Happiness.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends!!

It’s almost 3am as I write this, so I’ll make it brief. (It’ll probably come across more as a braindump as I clear my mind a bit ready to go to bed)

I’ve really been pushing Bruno up to scratch this last few days and the end is really in sight now; I’m into 2008’s archive, and I know I only have another 67 strips to transcribe to catch up. It might sound like a lot, it might sound like not very many; considering the archive is over 2,110 strips, it’s quite a feat to be this far.

With any luck I should finish those 67 tomorrow, and then I can collapse in a heap for a few hours. It’s been an extremely long journey but extremely worthwhile.

Plan of action is to add the next comic goodness, then get Melonpool up to scratch. The total archives ahead of me across untranscribed material is still standing around 2,700 strips, but once I have the new material up, I’ll go back to Melonpool and really push that one up too.

Actually, I’ve already had a look over the new material for an hour or so and have been able to automate it slightly; normally in a transcription I need to input the date and the strip’s title. For the 1,200 new strips I will shortly be adding, I already have lookup tables for these, so I simply need to enter the strip ID to get its title, date and URL. It’s not a massive saving, a few seconds per strip, but it all adds up.

But it’ll be here soon. Unfortunately first I need to go to bed.

Current Mood: tired