Search for Comics

Another new feature I've just added to the comic is the ability to search the archive for comics containing a certain word or phrase. I've wanted this feature since 2014! I always had to bring up a terminal and perform SQL queries manually to find the comic I was looking for.

Since the titles often don't give any real hints as to the content, I often had trouble finding one.

If you want to give it a try, go to the Archive page. You'll see the search box near the top.

The new Search feature!

Just type in a word or two and give it a try. If your search comes up empty, you'll get a confused-looking Business Frog to share in your puzzlement.

You won't have to search for today's comic though. The link to it is right here:

Amphibian.com comic for 15 August 2018

Minor Comic Style Improvements

I've made a few minor adjustments to the comic's style coinciding with the restart. You might not notice unless you have a keen eye for detail.

Font Upgrades

First, I've set a specific font for the free-text in comic frames. The speech bubbles have always used Sniglet, but any text that just floated there was actually set to Verdana with a fallback to sans serif. Sure, it looked fine for Windows users and didn't look too bad when I viewed them on Linux, but sometimes I'd be on a weird browser and get a weird font that looked...weird. I don't know why I never fixed this in the first three years of the comic, but when I set my mind on it I had a lot of trouble picking a free font that I liked. I ended up going with Ubuntu. Now the text should look consistent for all browsers on all operating systems.

Here's a sample of a comic in the original font:

And here's that same comic using the new font:

The difference is subtle, but I think it's important. I'm much happier with the new font.

In addition that font fix, I've added another font option for comics. Anything that's supposed to look hand-written will now use the Architect's Daughter font. It's clean and easy to read but also warm.

Here's an old comic with writing on the whiteboard:

And here's that same comic, updated for the new font:

Mobile Theme Color

Mobile users may also notice another minor change that I've made. I set a "theme color" so the address bar will be green. Oddly enough, this is done via meta tags instead of CSS like I'd expected.

<meta name="theme-color" content="#006600">

Here's what it looks like for me, in Chrome for Android:

More to Come

That's all for now, but there are more updates coming along with the new comics. Here's this week's:

Amphibian.com comic for 8 August 2018

Where Have I Been?

It's been a while. I wrote my last blog post over a year ago, and the comics stopped shorty after the blogs. Some people emailed me to make sure I was okay, since there was no notice or anything. Stuff just stopped. So what happened?

Lots of stuff. Life is complicated. My life is extra complicated.

My wife and I are foster parents. We have three of our own children and at any time we could have any number of additional children. In March of 2017, while I was out of town for business, we were given a 3-month-old foster baby. We already had a toddler only 21 months old. It was just too much. I didn't have time to make comics anymore. I didn't have time to sleep anymore. I burned through my buffer of comics. I found some time to finish a bunch of drafts that I'd started, but I was unable to start anything new and in August of 2017 they just ran out.

I didn't make an announcement or anything because I didn't know what to say. Was it only temporary? Was it the end? I didn't know.

And then things continued to get harder. In October, was got an additional foster child - the baby's 10-year-old sister. I was pretty sure I'd never write another comic again.

Until the spring of 2018. It turns out that babies grow into toddlers. They start sleeping through the night. I guess I should have remembered this fact about babies, but I was really really tired. I'm not saying that anything around here is easy, but I am somehow able to write comics again.

A few of them anyway.

I'm going to start slow. There's only going to be one new comic per week, on Wednesdays. And I don't know if I'll embed any games or anything in them for a while yet. But hey, I've got something. We'll see how it goes.

Here it is, the link to the comic you've all been waiting for!

Amphibian.com comic for 1 August 2018