Deviled Eggs at Dawn
Cron Script...of Doom!
posted by Clay on Tue, Jul 20th 2004This post is mostly to test out a cron script for the site. If all goes well, the site will automatically update every night, sans humans. This may be a sure sign that the machines will enslave mankind, but it will also save me the trouble of staying up ‘till the wee hours to generate the site on comic days, so I’m all for it. Once again, special thanks to Greg for handling all the backend. When I was working on Ghost Cat, I wasted a lot of time creating all the html pages manually. Now I can use that time to sleep or make a sandwich or something. You know, I can’t believe it. I’m still ahead in my comics. It feels weird not having a deadline immediately looming, but it also feels liberating. Yeah, I think I could get used to this. I’ve decided to take to the plunge into total geekdom. I’m attending Otakon. I’ve wanted to go for the past three years, but something always came up. It looks like this will finally be the year. If you want to see me there, I’ll be the faceless guy in the crowd next to the anime fan. Goodnight.
Under the Hood, Part II
posted by Greg on Tue, Jul 20th 2004Clay, how dare you reveal our inner-workings to the public? At least you haven't exposed our secret gerbil-based CPU. By the way, we're almost out of alfalfa.
Those of you who understand technology a little might be confused about "updating" the site. After all, we use a database... why aren't any changes reflected instantly? The answer is that to save a little in bandwidth and CPU, the index page is completely static. That means if we change something such as a news post or the location of the comic image, the page must be recreated. Fortunately this is easy: we just run our archive script and flush it to disk. Oh, and the archive script won't show any comic that hasn't been released yet.
With these systems combined, I am Capta... err, I mean, Clay and Hampton can work as far ahead as they like, and the comics will release themselves as time rolls on.