We Draw Comics

I am exhibiting at TCAF, if you are in Toronto come say ‘hi.’

I have some brand new comics and I will be displaying We Draw Comics on a brand new Wacom Cintiq 13 HD.  So come read some comics and play around with this cool new toy that Wacom is letting me use for this show.

♥tYLER

The past 2 weeks have been pretty crazy around here. There are a lot of new users and there are some stellar comics being made! Take a look at the Comic Book Covers jam, every single panel in it is solid gold. We Come Alive with the Moon is another extremely awesome comic.

New Features: You may have noticed some new additions on the Explore page. Last week I added a Search bar that will allow you to search for comics by their name. Today I added filtering options that will make it easier to find ‘sequential’ comics, ‘free for all’ comics and comics that have been completed. Hopefully these are intuitive enough to use, but if you have problems or ideas for improvement let me know.

In the news: Did you read the Tech Crunch article posted about We Draw Comics a few weeks ago. I was interviewed by Darrell Etherington and he is a pretty swell guy. Thanks Darrell.

Life of Tyler: If you read the Tech Crunch article you may have noticed that I also work a day job. I have been doing a project with the totally wonderful and awesome people at Puny Entertainment. Things are getting pretty busy at the moment but I promise that I will still devote all of my free time to working on We Draw Comics! (Except for this Thursday cause I am going to go see the midnight screening of the Hobbit and nothing you can say will make me change my mind!)

♥ tYLER

For a limited time We Draw Comics is opening up beta registration. If you missed out on the first open beta registration, now is your chance to jump in!

I have spent a lot of time optimizing We Draw Comics so that it can handle more users.

Starting today (November 26th) I would like to put that to the test. We Draw Comics will remain open until it has 5,000 users. So sign up fast before everyone else does!

Please join me in making some comics and invite all of your friends to make comics as well.

Click Here to Sign Up!

♥ tYLER

Hello everyone,

I am extremely proud and excited to announce the latest update to We Draw Comics.

Check it out by visiting http://beta.wedrawcomics.com/dashboard

As you may remember, the dashboard page was extremely slow to load and one of the most taxing on the servers, so much so, that in an emergency it had to be closed down for a few days. On top of that, it  was hard to actually notice what books are being updated.

I have spent these past few weeks COMPLETELY re-writing and re-structuring the dashboard Activity Feed. It now loads extremely fast and has had a lot of visual design improvements that will make keeping track of the progress on your favorite comics easier.

I really hope you enjoy the new dashboard and that it helps everyone make a better connection with comics.

Thank you everyone for being a part of We Draw Comics, none of this would have been possible without all the awesome feedback you give me.

♥ tYLER

P.S. Happy Halloween!

Hello everyone,

It has been over a week since I last posted an update to the site. Which for me is a pretty long time. I do not want you to think I have been slacking on the amount of work I have been putting into We Draw Comics. There is a good reason for the lack of updates this week.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback I have been getting is that the activity feed on the dashboard is a little confusing. It is overly repetitive in displaying when books you follow are updated. It is hard to keep track of important things, such as when someone ‘likes’ your panel or leaves a comment.

The dashboard is also an extremely slow page to load because if performs some really strenuous database queries.

I have spent the past week completely gutting and overhauling the Activity Feed on the dashboard. Hopefully the end result will be an easier to navigate activity feed with updates that are more relevant. I am also changing my entire approach on the backend so that the dashboard will load much faster and be optimized.

I have put a lot of work into it this week, but it still needs a little bit more polish before I am ready to send it out into the wild.

So stay tuned.

As always, thanks for drawing comics and thank you so much for your feedback and awesome emails. You guys are the best!

♥ tYLER

I have spent the past few days trying to fix some really nasty bugs that keep causing peoples web browsers to crash while drawing.

I have fixed some of these problems, but things are still not perfect.  That fact of the matter is sometimes web browsers just crash…and this really sucks. As an artist one of the worst things in the world is to put a bunch of time and effort into a drawing and then lose it all because a stupid computer had an accident.

So I decided to change my course of action and work on a new feature. We Draw Comics will now automatically save your drawings to your web browsers local storage. If the web browser crashes, just go back to the book you were working in and click the add panel button. It will now give you the option of reloading the drawing you had been working on.

Hopefully this will help alleviate some of the pain being caused by browsers crashing. Please let me know how it is working for you.

♥ tYLER

Take a look to your right.  You should be able to see the new fancy bug list with updated current bugs and requested features that I am working on.

If you click the more button near the bottom of the list, it will bring you to the bugs index page which will show you ALL of the bug and requested features for the site that are currently on my radar.

They are even listed in order of the priority that I am working on them.

Please check this list out from time to time, and if you are experiencing any of these bugs please let me know, especially if you have any info about ways to replicate the bug for testing.

Thanks

<3 tYLER

You may have recently noticed that some panels had been missing or not loading.

This was a result of the Amazon S3 server that hosts all of the media and image files for we draw comics.  Sometimes when a server grows too rapidly they have to transfer files to a new and larger fish bowl.

As a result a few of the image files became out of sync and suffered from “eventual consistency”  This means it just took them a little bit of time to recognize that they are at a new location and properly working.

Sorry for any stress this may have caused,

<3 tYLER