I'm sat here today thinking of so many different ways to try and come up with an introduction, here's what I got so far:

"Greetings one and all to another auto piloted message of..."

"inasdbsgonasd oaisndoignis aisdnasbd (<- roles face across keyboard)"

So obviously now that the half baked introduction is complete let me get on and discuss with you what I've been doing for most of this past week. First there was the gawking at the pages Yee has produced (I love page 5 but unfortunately you guys will have to wait till the 12th of June to see it). We've been having various different discussions about where we want to take Kingdom Star (like if we just want to keep it as a web comic and nothing more) but it's all really brief; Yee wants to make sure that there are enough pages ready so that if her Masters course work turns around and gives her a problem the comic isn't hindered.

I've also been feverishly building additional features into the web application that Kingdom Star runs off. One thing I get a lot of is (a couple of) people turning to me saying "Drew I don't use Facebook or Twitter, build in an RSS feed". I honestly have zero experience with RSS, I've never used it and out of the large number of people I know maybe 2 of them use it where they don't use facebook. I wasn't prepared to build a feature for the minority that won't use Facebook or Twitter to follow us to then only cater for the smaller minority that uses RSS instead. So what have I done instead? I built in a subscription email McJiggers. So it works by:

• The person selects the updates they want to receive
  
• They types in their email address
  
• They hit return/enter
  
• They go to their email and click the verification link in the confirmation email
  
• Job done!

So when a new page is released an email gets sent out to the list of recipient emails (don't worry, it's done 1 at a time so no one can see your email) and they're notified about the new Comic Page. Later this will work for Galleries too.

The next relatively important feature is called Comic Memory where the page follows where you've been reading. So say you're happily reading away and you get to page 5 but you go away on holiday for a month. When you come back there has been an additional 4 pages but you'll have to go backwards through all the new content before you can continue from where you left off. Comic Memory follows your reading and could be done in a number of different ways:

• Readers have to log in for Comic Memory to know where you last work
  
• Cookies could be used for Comic Memory
  
• External IP Address could be used for Comic Memory

The choices were relatively problematic. People wouldn't want to log in, it's too much effort for something so mundane. Cookies are easily deleted and quite often are. External IP Address' can change if a home Router is ever reset. The decision I had to make was a relatively difficult one and I decided to go for the External IP Address. In choosing the External IP it made the job relatively simple, if a person is going to the comic page but there was no record of them previously viewing it then Comic Memory will default to the last page. I'll attempt to see if I can come up with a better more concrete solution but this is what I've currently got thus far.

Anyhoo, this is a chunk of the work I've been doing towards Kingdom Star, all for the progress of comics... delicious comics ;)

Regards
~Xeno

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