On Midgarn's Tales

Or, what do I want out of my GI Joe diorama-comic fan fiction site?

I dunno. Using the basic Blogger blog may work for Midgarn's Tales, but I don't think it will ultimately work out.  It shows the pictures sequentially, and I can group them all together one post per comic, but I can foresee that in short order, the site will get hugely cluttered.  Plus, I use a lot of custom figures for the work that sometimes are in gear that are not the most iconic version of the character.

That's Airtight? Where's all the yellow?

On my old site, I created a Dossier page that would bring up all the basic info about the character, my best guesses as to the real-life MOS / ratings for that character, plus any other deviations I made from the canon regarding the person. We'll use Airtight as the example again:

(OK, really. The mouse is down here. Why does the newly-inserted pic appear at the top? I'll just switch to HTML, cut and paste the div.. Hah. Showed you, interface!)

So, yeah, about 100 Joes have a dossier, with the Cobras and other characters to follow. I'd like to have that again, and I really don't see an elegant way to do that in the blog.

I'd also like to have a person click on a particular "issue" (these are comics after all), and then flip through it like a gallery. You know the kind that gray out the page, and have left and right arrows to move fore and back through the pages pictures?  A blog post gives me that 'here's the link to the new issue' requirement, but the page seems to show every recent post, so it's a stream of picture after picture.

Why not just put up the old page? Because it was clunky. And old. I wrote it up in ~2004, but I used 1990 html technology -- it used FRAMES to navigate.  Shudder.  It also wasn't the easiest thing to point readers to the newest issue. The home page of my site was elegant: www . midgarnstales . info .  But for a given comic? That / Issues / bpscene1.htm . Granted, who looks at the gibberish up in the URL field any more? (Hackers.)  But still, I'd kinda like it to be elegant. Easy to maneuver, and easy to provide just an issue link.

And that dossier? a hundred separate html pages. At the time, I didn't know the first thing about SQL.  Now, I don't know the second thing about SQL, but I do know the very basics about creating a database.  I may not yet know how to create a field that can have 0-x entries in it (like that "Vehicle Qual" field in the Airtight "record" above), but it can't be that hard!

Finally, there's the gravy: the visual look. I mentioned having the issues come up one panel at a time. I'd love to have a frame around the main screen, maybe like the PIT's main screen a la the Sunbow cartoons, or something akin to GI Joe #1, where we saw the small monitors with the Joes' dossiers beneath a larger screen. The small monitors would be the controls: "Dossier, Comics, Minis, etc" for the main menu would switch to say "Joes, Cobras, Noks, Red Shadows, etc" if Dossier was pressed, would switch to "First, Previous, Dogfight, Duke, Dusty, Faces, Falcon, Fast Draw, Next, Last" or something similar. Clicking on the name would then change the main screen to the dossier.  A similar path for the comics.

Anyhow, I'm eager to hear suggestions on what may already be out there to do what I want.