Queued Up and Ready To Go

My last post was inspirational. It's time to show off some stuff.

I’ve been doing some work for a while and it feels like this whole project is getting closer to an alpha state. A place where I could open this up to a few pals and see what breaks.

For the record, it’s not there yet but it’s getting close. And I want to show off a few bits and pieces if only to say: We’re making progress.

So let’s just dive into things.

Home

A simple home page

The home page is interesting. It’s simple and that’s the goal. Here’s three (random every time you load the page) options you could look into reading right now and (mostly) where to find them. The eventual plan is to only ever show comic series that you can actually read right now with the series we’re indexing. It’s a small tweak, but not done yet.

One small hurdle I need to get solved sooner rather than later: We’re missing quite a few images from the site. And that’s fine. Sort of. There’s a mechanism in place to pull those images after some poking and with a little more data gathering on my end, but it’s where things stand right now. Another thing to fix.

Hopefully folks go right to Searching and that’s that.

Search

The search for this site isn’t much because it’s very dumb, but from the home page, you can (maybe) get right to the comic series you’re looking for by simply typing a few characters.

Then of course if you hit Enter…

Boom, a huge list of comics that look pretty similar to the dropdown search, but with huge images. I may shrink this down in the future, but we’ll see. This view is paginated until the results run out. Terms like “x-men” or “batman” show a TON of results because, well, there’s a lot of comic series with those terms in them. Currently, if you have a lot of results, you need to paginate. It’s not great, but it’s a start.

Just like the home page, you get a small preview of the services the comic series you’re looking for is available on¹.

Some searches are easier than others.

Viewing A Series

Clicking into a series will get you information about a series and where you can potentially read it (assuming it’s been been digested by the backend system).

Click on a service logo and it’ll take you to where you can read the book, or in the case of this series, where you can find more information via the publisher².

And that’s… it?

Sort of. There’s so much friggin’ backend work has been done to make this whole site work the way that I want. A lot of things live in the Admin side of this site just so I can manage data and how things are linked up. Not to mention the data aggregation and database business, but that’s not showy--or at least not in a way I think it’s interesting.

And, well, I guess I can show off a piece of that that I’m working on…

“Moderator” view

I don’t know what to call this yet (“moderator” feels too loaded, imo), but as I said in my last post near the end, without turning this into a site you need or want to login to, I’m thinking a lot about User submitted data because I feel like some folks may want to use this site and they may want to fix some of the data themselves. I also think that some crowdsourcing could help bring things to life in a manner that may work better than me manually (or auto-magically) doing it³.

So with that in mind, I churned out this view:

It’s not perfect but it’s the start of an interface that privileged folks would have access to for updating series information. My thought for an “alpha” version of Just Read Comics would be handing some of the keys to a view like this over to a handful of folks to help source some of the data for this site because it would be a massive help.

Aaand crap. I see a little bug in this that I need to fix. sigh

So that’s that

From where I sit, this feels like I’m showing off the top decks of the ship that is Just Read Comics, but without walking through the backend mechanisms of the admin or spitting out lines of code into this newsletter, this is where the eventual public-facing side of Just Read Comics stands.

This feels like a really short entry, but I intentionally didn’t add much description here of functions beyond the core ideas. I really want to hear what people think about where things are now and how they think things should function.

• What would make this easier to use?

• What didn’t I talk about that you think is crucial to a site like this being useful?

• How would you use this site?

Let me know.

In Other News

I figure I should also use this place to shoutout some of the work I’ve been doing over at I Read Comic Books lately because it’s what I spend a bunch of my time doing between work, playing Pokémon Go / TCG, and building Just Read Comics.

Since my last post went up, IRCB has had a few episodes go out, including a slight shake-up to our show’s format which has been pretty fun and made the show feel a bit more dynamic for me.

Still Alive. Giving Zero Fucks. (ft. Dave Baker, Mary Tyler MooreHawk)

We had Dave Baker on the show to talk comics and Dave is always a person who I love chatting with. The dude lives and breathes comics. He’s never not creating something and while we talked comics (and a prose book), we also went deep into his new OGN Mary Tyler MooreHawk--a mix between a comic book and a collection of fictional future-history zines. I can’t wait to get my hands on my physical copy.

Books To Read If You’re Numb Like Me

This is the first episode using IRCB’s new format where we slimmed down the number of comics we’re talking about and let ourselves play a little looser with the conversation. I think this episode perfectly encapsulates that, with both Danny and Kara being fantastic people to talk to while swimming back and forth between comic talk and tangential bits. I’m incredibly happy with how this episode turned out and the twist we’ve taken on the show in general.

The Punxsutawney Cover-up

Another episode in our new format and I think this is one of the funniest episodes we’ve recorded of IRCB to date. We hit the threshold more often than not of being a super fun comic book podcast while also being ridiculously hilarious, and I have to credit Nick and Kait for carrying my exhausted and flubbering self on this specific episode. Nick always brings out my ability to be extremely goofy and this episode is no exception.

Next Time

I think I’ll try to wrap up that “moderator” view and give an update, plus I’ll discuss any feedback I might get from this specific post. Comment below or shoot me an email: justreadcomics.mike [at] gmail.com

1. There’s something to be said about “partial” availability especially when it comes to series like Detective Comics or Uncanny X-Men but I still need to determine if

1. That’s something I care about (now)

2. If there’s some sort of visual language I can use with a tooltip that explains exactly what is available

2. It could be fun to add links out to creator sites or Wikipedia, Fandom, etc. But I’m going to put that idea on the very back burner unless folks clamor for it.

3. I’m not trying to take advantage of people in this, but humans are way smarter about finding information than a few hundred (or thousand) lines of code are in my opinion and I’d love to reward people for their time if/when this happens.