Did you know it was two years ago today that I posted my first comic on my website? To commemorate the occasion, I’m going to go ahead and do a “soft-launch” of this new website redesign. The Tyranny of Pants is now a semi-autonomous sub-domain of my regular site! That means the URL has changed a bit, so if you’ve been making use of bookmarks or RSS, now might be a good time to update those. For those of you using RSS, you can find the unfiltered feed here— that’ll give you everything posted here, from the weekly comics, to the periodic news posts like the one you’re reading now. If you want just the comics, though, a feed tuned to provide only those can be found here. After a transitional time, typing in the tyrannyofpants.com domain will bring you here too, but that’s going to go ahead and remain pointed at the “old site” until I can spread the word around a bit.

Now, the exciting thing for me about all of this is that it gives me some greater flexibility in some aspects managing the site. I was using iWeb for the previous version, and while that suited my purposes just fine, it kept me tethered to a single computer. iWeb also hasn’t been updated since 2009, so the writing was pretty much on the wall for how long I’d be able to continue using the program. Shifting to this new platform, though, I can literally make updates and changes from my phone! Or via a borrowed computer in a Hungarian hostel! In practical terms, though, I’ll most likely keep using the computer I usually do. I’m also excited to make better use of CSS and widgety features that will automatically apply to all of the pages, instead of having to be manually applied to each page. With more than 100 comics now, that makes even the slightest nudge in layout a major task to implement! Now it’ll just be a matter of clicking “update”, and it’ll roll-out on its own without all that tedious repetition.

And speaking of making changes, I’m interested in hearing any feedback, tips, and recommendations you might have about the layout, ease-of-use, and so on. The site is still a work-in-progess, and you’ll likely see little shifts, nudges, and changes as you visit from time to time. At the time of this writing, for example, I still need to add an “about” page to provide some background info about myself. I’ve also got to fill in the archive– only a portion of the comics have been transferred to the new site so far, so most of the content is absent right now! Now that I think of it, this might be a good opportunity to test out one of these new features at my disposal, the “feedback form”:

(Editors Note: “Feedback Form” deactivated June 2nd, 2014. It had served its purpose, and had mostly become an avenue for bots to send me cryptic and poorly worded messages that weren’t entertaining enough to keep around.)

So, let’s see what that does. Anyway, have a look around, and let me know what you think!