Organize It
By Tracy on January 5th, 2010Posted In: Blog
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WARNING: THIS BLOG IS FULL OF ADVICE.
Well, How-To's, Hacks, and General Discussion, really; but also alot of guidance on how to do things, and on what not to do. It's what I've learned, and what I'm sharing with you.
Much of it is solid. The rest requires more be said. Please weigh what you learn here with other insights to see what works best for you. Thank you.
For more tips and tutorials, see: http://www.reddit.com/r/makecomics
Written and Contributed by Guest Guru: Bo Lumpkin.
Here we are just getting into the year 2010. When it comes to organization I am like the man who jumped on the horse and rode off in all directions. I have been posting on the internet for about 18 months now and my current output is between 16 and 20 posts per week. I post a new comic on my site at http:/www.bolumpkin.com each day and because sometimes my output is greater than seven comics per week I post some extras on my site at http://www.gatorhead.wordpress.com and then I contribute to a daily devotional site at http://shilohbaptist.blogspot.com.
I have discovered with this much output that there comes a time when you have to take a little time from producing and posting (along with the promoting) to do a little organizing. I have about a month’s worth of comics in the holding pen just waiting to be posted and it occurred to me that I needed to organize them a little so I would at least have an idea when they were created and when I should use them.
Thankfully with Microsoft Windows we aren’t limited to the 8 character titles that we had back in the dark ages. Titles can be nearly as long as you want to make them. To organize them I decided to put a number before each one. That let’s me know in what order I created it. I have several characters that I use in my comics on a regular basis so I have also added the initials of the characters. I have two redneck men who discuss the problems of the world named Kurt and Burt, therefore I decided to add the initials and the year to the number. An upcoming comic once titled just “Shades and Plumbin’” has now become KB 10-9 Shades and Plumbin’. This lets me know who the characters are, the year it was published (If you want you can also add the month), the order it was created, and the title of the comic. This will help me keep up with when I created what. You might want to work out your own system but you do need something.
I also suggest making seperate directories for different categories of your posts, especially comics. I have directories named NEW, USED, PREPOSTED, etc. Also under my Comics directories after a comic is used I have one for each character or set of characters. I store these on my hard drive, on my zip drive and on my backup external hard drive. I might misplace a file but I seldom lose one. You do have to do some housekeeping to keep up with it but it is sure better than losing your work.
When I first started out I never dreamed that I would be coming up on my 500th post (on the http://www.bolumpkin.com site alone) so soon.
Get it organized and keep on bloggin’.
Bo Lumpkin
