Creating A Webcomic To Learn Web Programming

Recently I’ve been thinking about web projects. Right now I’m working on one — redesigning my drawing site — and that’s going pretty well. When I hit my next milestone for it, I’ll update the status here. After doing the design in GIMP, I took some time to properly learn CSS and PHP. Up until now, I’ve been a hack at both of them — butchering code to get things working. I’m trying to accomplish more elegant solutions now.

Since the drawing site is undergoing a major overhaul, I wanted something a bit smaller and simpler to put on the web first. The first thought that came to mind was some type of small interactive web application. But although I’ve been an application programmer for a while, I don’t have much interest in web applications. So I settled on building a website consisting of dynamic database-driven webpages. It’s nothing new, but it’s a project that will get my feet wet for this whole web programming thing. And since I have quite a few drawings that can be used as a starting point for a webcomic, I decided to use this for the site’s content, thus making the project a webcomic.

I know that I could use wordpress and the comicpress theme for it. But I just didn’t want to go that route. Currently I use wordpress for quite a few of my sites, and it’s terrific software, but I wanted to try something different; create more of a learning experience. I love building things from scratch, and I’ve been itching to do this on the web.

I’m still sketching out the details, but I thing it’s going to be pretty simple for the most part. There probably won’t be support for things such as commenting and forums. I think these features are unnecessary and most of the webcomics I like don’t have them. Well it’s back to work for me!

Kim Jackson

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