technology

Yes, I love technology
but not as much as you, you see.
But I still love technology
Always and forever.

-Kip Dynamite

Thanks to all who have already commented on the new blog. It tickles us to see that we still have Cake Wreck readers readers who keep up with us, as well as longtime friends.

One of the commenters has asked how we did the comic book – and because I, like Kip, love technology, I’m happy to oblige.

The comic book was written over a few days using pictures we mostly already had, and an application called Comic Life. Comic Life is a fantastic program which made doing all the captions and thought bubbles and image filters a snap, and even provides amusing sound effects to make it that much more, well, comic.

To share the news with our parents, we found an amazing deal with a company called ComiXPress, which is a print shop that specializes in printing comic books in the traditional 6.625″ x 10.25″ size. (They are actually set up so that small retail comic artists can sell their comics on their site) To our amazement, the president of ComiXPress actually read Supergrands and decided to print our small order gratis. It’s hard to know how to express our gratitude, but this little act of kindness on their part reminded us of what it was like to be James’s parents and have complete strangers be completely captivated by his charm. Anyway, the finished comic books look really sharp and official – much cooler than the image I put up on this blog.

Now somebody, before too long, is bound to ask us about the “comic book” style titling on the blog posts. That was a nifty trick I discovered here. Essentially, a little bit of PHP and Javascript can replace a heading style on any blog with a dynamically-generated image using a TrueType font installed on the web server. There is not much I enjoy more than hacking into a WordPress theme and tweaking it to look like what I want it to look like. I guess in saying that I’m inviting anyone make suggestions for different widgets or stylesheet modifications.

Oh speaking of widgets, I guess most of you reading this probably figured out how to use the RSS feed which is somewhere on the right with a little orange icon. That’s probably a good way to follow this blog, because we may not write as often as we wrote on the last blog.

One of these days Abby will probably write about something other than cascading style sheets. Promise.

Late edit: We encourage all to leave comments on the blog; the more readers who comment, the more encouraged we are to write. When you leave a comment, it will display your gravatar next to it. And if you don’t know what a gravatar is or haven’t bothered to create one, the House will decide what you look like. (As of this afternoon, you look like Scourge of the Underworld. Justice is served!) Once you have a gravatar, all your comments on this blog and many others will use the picture you selected.