CaptainSpam @captainspam@social.exclaimindustries.net

Oh, all right, I'll pin a useful toot:

Some amount of this account will refer to my comic, The Dementia of Magic, at https://dementiaofmagic.net. Others may refer to nothing really at all.

Got it. Turns out jQuery's .html() method doesn't quite work the way I expected when multiple elements are involved. Should be fixed now.

Woah. Something with my widget isn't agreeing with that last toot.

There we go. The second edition PDF of Chapter Three is now up. It's *mostly* US Letter sized, but I took a lot more liberty in changing page sizes for bigger comics, given it's digital and all. Here's a link!

(this is a ~100MB download, by the by; be forewarned)

https://dementiaofmagic.net/book/pdfs/DoMChapter3eBookWebLetter.pdf

I've also got a physical copy of Chapter Three en route just to see how it looks. Hopefully that works out.

The books arrived yesterday. Looks like I don't need the super-expensive premium color processing (it looks like it was designed for photo books, as it gives everything a glossy sheen), and Lulu's stuff is of otherwise comparable quality to KDP. So that's good news, at least.

Though I might need to do some minor re-layouts for the new margins. More to come.

Test copies of the US Letter version of Chapter Two of the DoM are en route. Hopefully Lulu's not-super-premium color processing is good enough, because holy cow the price shoots up a LOT the moment you turn on the premium option.

Of course, if not-premium's good enough but premium's noticeably and appreciably *better*, maybe I'll keep a few copies of that around just to be fancy schmansy.

I like the phrase "English is a flawed language". It implies the existence of some immaculate, flawless language that isn't at all pretentious.

I just started poking around with making a US Letter version of Chapter Three of the DoM. That one might take a bit more work than Chapter Two. Turns out that, since I was going digital-first for all the sketches and, more importantly, page-size full-bleed images, the originals are much tighter to those original 8"x10½" sizes, so I'll need to manually edit most of them to look right.

So that'll be a project.

The second edition (US-Letter-sized) PDF version of The Dementia of Magic Chapter Two is now up for download! Still researching options for the physical version, and I'll get Chapter Three going eventually.

(linking to the Books page so you don't get a surprise ~100MB download; look down the page for the "Or, download a PDF!" link for Chapter Two)

https://dementiaofmagic.net/books/

There's only one 'S' in Daylight Saving Time, dagnabbit!

DAGNABBIT, I SAY!

Huh. Turns out it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be to re-layout the first DoM book to 8½"x11" (US Letter) instead of 8"x10½" (US Government Letter?). So, I've got a layout that might work for print-on-demand shops that don't take custom book sizes.

I also went over the commentary to rework some of it, so there's also that. It's technically a second edition now, so I'll replace the PDF version on the website soon enough. More on a new physical book edition later.

There we go. I think I've got just about everything I want in the widget for now. Now I know how to abuse embedded SVGs to use as icons, too. So that's cool.

https://github.com/CaptainSpam/mastowidget

Next, here's a poll for testing the widget. I think the API is pretty clear on this, but some usable data couldn't hurt.

And awesome, a deleted post doesn't even show up in the API. That makes that part easier.

I think the only other major things are handling polls and maybe displaying a count of boosts/replies/favorites, when applicable. I'm definitely not going to try to handle interacting with a poll from the widget, as that would entail some login shenanigans I'm not really prepared to deal with at the moment. Still, usefulness abounds!

Oh, hey, I wonder how the API treats custom server emoji...

Widget development is coming along nicely. I'm lucky that my current public timeline has a few good examples of special-case posts for me to test stuff out (boosts, replies, image attachments, etc).

Though, if you see me start to make weird posts with specific flags set (content warnings/sensitive, spoiler tags, etc) for seemingly no reason at all, well, now you know why.

The first draft of the newly-renamed mastowidget is now live on the DoM website. It works, per se, in that images show up when posted, but there's still a bunch of other neat stuff I can add in.

Also, the layout may change significantly. I've got better ideas, ideas that DON'T involve using CSS float and overly-fixed-size boxes. More on that when it happens.

Oh ho ho... it looks like I can now get actual public API data from Mastodon servers without needing authentication. I think it's high time I updated my webpage widget to allow for things like, say, fetching images and metadata along with the text of posts...

Anyone reading this on the DoM website, you may eventually start to see actual images show up without going to the actual Mastodon page, is what I'm saying.

So, discussions occurred in IRC late last night, and...

It's great that, after accounting for Fangamer t-shirts and merch sold in the LRR store, Desert Bus for Hope 2020's final tally was over $1M raised for charity. Yay!

Though, it has exposed an unfortunate display bug in my widget, in that I could swear I accounted for dollar amounts over $1M just in case, but it turns out I didn't. Hrm. Must investigate.