You might notice the site looks different. You might. That’s because I’m now using ComicPress to run the site! It’s different, but man, it’s nice. Everything is so easy and so…automated. So anyway, sit tight while I work out the bugs, and enjoy the new George website.

Getting this site over to the new server was such a pain in my ass. As you might have noticed if you are a frequent George visitor, the site’s been down for the bulk of the last 48 hours. Now, however, it’s up–which should be obvious–but every now and then I get a 500 Internal Server Error. Are you guys getting that, too? I installed some WordPress plugins and shortly thereafter is when I started experiencing the problem, so I disabled them all and hopefully this will clear up the problem. Hopefully. If you run into the occasional Internal Server Error message, please let me know, hokai? Thanks.

Obviously you know by now that there’s been a substantial change in how the site looks, but what about how it functions? First, the “Archives” system is completely different. Now, there’s more than one way to find what you’re looking for. First, you can click on the Archives link at the top of the page, which displays a big long list of every single George comic. Useful if you want to just jump in at a certain time period and start reading. Second, you can navigate via the calendar on the sidebar to the right. There’s also a drop-down menu that lists the comics by the month they were released. Clicking on a particular month will bring up a page of comic thumbnail images; click on one to see the full-size comic. From there, you can use the First, Previous, Next, and Last buttons to get around. Furthermore, all the comics are “tagged” with the characters who appear in them and certain other keywords, so you can easily find all the strips that, say, Chiwawa has appeared in by searching for “Chiwawa” in the sidebar. Or, just hit the Previous or First button underneath the comic right from the start!

Also, you can comment on every single comic or blog post! In the past, you could only comment on blog posts, and even that was a little sketchy because I did it through Blogger. But now, you stay right here, you don’t have to be a subscriber or member of anything, and you can comment on just about anything you want. It’s great.

There are new ways to share comics with other people! Under every comic is a bit of text that reads, “Share and Enjoy” with a bunch of little icons underneath it. Each one of these icons links to a site like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, or Redditt (to name just a few) that let you share the comic with other people. Also, at the top of the sidebar to the right, there’s a link called “ShareThis” which performs the exact same function, but can be accessed from virtually any page on the site. I figured, the more ways to share the strip with other people, the better, right?

On the Administrative side, WordPress is just a joy. I liked my old site, it looked nice and got the job done, but I’m no programmer. Running the comic on a professional, widely-used, well-designed system like WordPress is so nice. The only downside to all of this is that I haven’t made a new comic in several days, so you know what? I’m off to go write some scripts. Enjoy the new site!