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Sally Sells You Stuff (comics)  (View post)

Ulf Sjöström [PersonRank 1]

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
14 years ago4,983 views

clever, could work!

Marcin Sochacki (Wanted) [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

The old truth goes: pretty girls increase sales. Great idea :-)

Wow... [PersonRank 0]

14 years ago #

She is hot... :D

Abhisshek [PersonRank 3]

14 years ago #

Nice comics and yes she is CUTE ;)

Abhisshek [PersonRank 3]

14 years ago #

BTW Phillipp is your neighbor from China or from Germany

George R [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Most of the page specific text is embedded as part of an image. Won't this make it difficult for various web entities to utilize that text? Search engines may not index that text. Translation tools may not translate that text. Audio rendering may not include that text.

I noticed that you have AdSense code embedded in the page source, but I do not see any AdSense ads.

Having all the panes in one image may be more efficient, but it may be inconvenient if the screen or window is small or narrow.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

George R wrote:
> I do not see any AdSense ads

I'm seeing relevant ads from the UK.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Agreed, a better alt text could have various pros. If I wanted to make the alt text relevant I would probably have to output each individual image as one panel, and then write some alt text for each panel. Right now, I only include a sentence or so of alt text because I don't think alt text is made for really long strings (for that, we have the longdesc attribute, which AFAIK is rather unused). I will ponder that, I figured that the several image requests would slow the page down, so I put it all in one panel. [Hmm, on second thoughts, perhaps a bigger div layer, collapsed when you load the page but expandable via JS/CSS, could contain the whole description. It's worth noting that many of the things cannot be "preserved" by simply transcribing the speech bubbles, though...]

Multiple panels would have pros on some mobile devices too, because they could be line-broken wherever the screen width ends. It's what I did at http://www.flixd.com

I do store each panel image as individual, bigger PNG (as well as a CPT, which includes the text layer as text), which is then auto-converted into the single image using a PHP script, so I have some options in the future if I want to change the page layout...

As far as translations go, I see three ways:
1) paste the translation into the CPT source files individually in Corel PhotoPaint (lots of manual work, but would probably allow for most fine tuning in terms of speech bubble layout and so on, for most pixel perfect results),
2) add the font in PHP, based on some translation XML file, this would keep the nice comic-style font but it would require a speech bubble position & size, as well as font size and style information for every speech bubble (some bubbles use bold, some use smaller text, which is part of the expression)
3) add the font in the HTML via CSS, probably with some PHP similarly based on an XML and a positioning file.

I might be interested in translating this to Chinese, for instance, though I get a feeling many of the jokes could be lost if the translator isn't very careful, so it would probably need to be a rather expensive, professional translator closely working with the material (and not some translation service just based on a text file). German, I could translate myself. But first let's see how many fans Sally gets :)

> BTW Phillipp is your neighbor from China or
> from Germany

From China...

By the way, I did not include any AdSense on the homepage of Sally for now, but just on most subsequent pages (but not all subsequent pages, I would have to check though what the exact settings at the moment are...).

George R [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

There is a new page titled "Turing and Mushrooms"
http://sallysellsyoustuff.com/turing.html

The main image fails to render.
http://image.sallysellsyoustuff.com/turing.jpg

<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
   ...
</Error>

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Whoops. I hadn't even planned to put this episode live yet. Thanks George, I've updated the database. We prepared 4 episodes in advance but I wanted to wait a bit before releasing those.

George R [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Is "Of Clocks and Guns" another unreleased episode?
On its page "older episode" links to "Marble Madness".
On the "Marble Madness" page "newer episode" links to "Bliptronics and Pipes".

cache: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Asallysellsyoustuff.com%2Fclocks-and-guns.html

image: image.sallysellsyoustuff.com/clocks-and-guns.jpg

George R [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

I seem to have found another called "It's Magic".
Its "newer episode" links to "Mr. Rubik". Its "older episode" links to "Of Clocks and Guns". The "newer episode" for "Of Clocks and Guns" links back to "It's Magic".

cache: http://google.com/search?q=cache:sallysellsyoustuff.com/its-magic.html
image: image.sallysellsyoustuff.com/its-magic.jpg

The ebay link from "Of Clocks and Guns" does not seem to work properly.
http://rover.ebay.com/roverimp/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574865277&toolid=10001&campid=5336524253&customid=standalonelink&mpt=12112

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

14 years ago #

Heh. You seem to be good at digging up unreleased episodes George! :)

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