Coswell Productions

Guest strip!

johncoswell — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:20:47 +0000

I did a guest strip for The Dada Detective, entirely in Inkscape and The GIMP (surprise!) Plus, they have some kind words for ComicPress Manager. But don’t read just my guest strip while you’re there — read their whole archive. It’s a very cool comic.

New tool for PHP: Harmonious Code

johncoswell — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:12:02 +0000

I just put the finishing touches on the first release of a new tool that will help me when working on WordPress plugins like ComicPress Manager: Harmonious Code, the PHP static code version checker. The tool looks at the functions & constants being used in your copied and pasted PHP code and reports back what version of PHP and what PECL modules you need installed. It gets the version information straight from the PHP documentation. It’s very rough at the moment, and I know the accuracy can be greatly improved, but it’s functional for what I need it to do right now, which is make sure the next few releases of ComicPress Manager continue to work on PHP 4.

Not only was this project geared toward building a useful tool, but it was a way for me to learn haXe, a very interesting and young Web programming language that compiles to a VM called Neko, to PHP, to JavaScript, and to ActionScript. I’m still learning, and the language is still evolving, but it seems to be a pretty good fit so far. I hope to work in it some more down the road. I must warn you, the code is probably not the best-looking code in the world at the moment.

So if you do PHP development, try out Harmonious Code and let me know what you think. You can download a local copy of the browser-based analyzer for yourself, and you can grab the source code off of GitHub.

Dawn’s Dictionary Drama is back!

johncoswell — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:00:57 +0000

For those who remember, I was running an older version of Dawn’s Dictionary Drama on this site. I’ve rebooted the series and it now lives at http://www.dawnsdictionarydrama.com/. Take a peek and let me know what you think!

ComicPress: The Technical Guide Part 3 is out

johncoswell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:51:52 +0000

The third and final part in the ComicPress: The Technical Guide series is live:

http://claritycomic.com/2008/09/16/comicpress-the-technical-guide-part-3-of-3/

It covers the basics of WordPress theme editing, tweaking your site for improved performance/bandwidth usage, and support options for ComicPress and ComicPress Manager.

ComicPress: The Technical Guide Part 2 is Live

johncoswell — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:21:24 +0000

Part 2 is live. It covers the basics of setting up ComicPress, using ComicPress Manager, and some of the basic performance tweaks you can do to WordPress to make it faster. Part 3 next week!

ComicPress: The Technical Guide

johncoswell — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:59:23 +0000

I’m doing a series of more technical posts on the A Moment of Clarity site about the ComicPress theme and ComicPress Manager, and how to make it really sing. Check them out and let me know what you think!

81 - “Touch of Evil”

johncoswell — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:31:42 +0000

Touch of Evil on IMDb

Synopsis: Charlton Heston and Orson Welles play “Good Cop, Bad Cop.”

Pros: Wow, I was watching this and got so sucked into it that 45 minutes went like *snaps fingers* that. It was very riveting, and very well done.

Cons: The reefer boys were…interesting. Very old skool.

Verdict: Yeah, this was a pretty sweet movie, and by sweet I mean awesome. Definitely check it out.

78 - “Some Like It Hot”

johncoswell — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:08:19 +0000

Some Like It Hot on IMDb

Synopsis: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in women’s clothing and hang around with Marilyn Monroe.

Pros: Old school mafia stuff is awesome. Marilyn Monroe was hot. There were some pretty funny parts, that’s for sure.

Cons: OK, there’s one scene where something unexpected begins to happen to someone, and they don’t react the way that they should. That struck me as odd. Yes, this was vague on purpose.

Verdict: Very good movie! Rent it today.

ComicPress Manager 1.0: An adventure in WordPress complete!

johncoswell — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:24:53 +0000

Just a note for all you comic artists and WordPress + ComicPress folks: I just finished the first stable version of ComicPress Manager, version 1.0. It was quite and adventure trying to wrestle out a high-class plugin from the sometimes-awkward WordPress API and the quite-awkward syntax & behaviors of PHP (how about glob(), on some systems, returning FALSE if there’s no files in the directory? That one bit me good…). But it’s done (for now) and you can check out all the plugin goodness on the WP Extend site. Yeah!

“79″ — All About Eve

johncoswell — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:18:43 +0000

All About Eve on IMDb

Synopsis: Anne Baxter looks up to Bette Davis just oh so much!

Pros: The opening monologue was a hoot, and boy, were the ladies catty and the men cunning.

Cons: I had to watch it in two parts since the month of July has been so ridiculously busy.

Verdict: Not bad. Not bad at all.