Rocket Bomber - site news

Despite appearances, Comicsnob was not my website.

That’s the crux of the matter, and really, the only reason for the change in brand names:

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It may go down as one of the most successful “guest blogger” gigs in the (admittedly short) history of the blogosphere — Comicsnob.com was founded in October of 2006 by my good friend Bob Holt, with the mission to provide “Reviews by a guy who just likes to read quality work.”

Two months later I climbed onboard and started blogging about manga.

And the manga slowly took over.

Since I work as a bookseller, I also occasionally write about the industry because that’s my knowledge base, and hell, some people seem to be interested in my opinion on that topic. It also occurred to me to try a ranking of manga based on online sales, and that went up on Comicsnob, too.

Bob is certainly better at website nuts-n-bolts — in fact he’s recently been hired to work as a Web Designer full time. My expertise is in producing mounds of dubious content. Between the two of us, we managed a fair run on Comicsnob. It ended up as more of a manga and anime site, not so much with the American comics, but that’s OK. It’s what we (I) ended up with, and seemingly the readers were happy enough with it.

But now it’s time for me to strike out on my own (and pay my own hosting bills) and while I hate to leave behind an established brand, “comicsnob” isn’t mine, and I’ve been stretching the “comics” part of that (almost out of recognition) for years. With a new site and a new domain name, there is a chance to rethink the blog mission and tackle new topics. —And Bob is still on board as part-time support staff — you know, when he can take time away from the paying gig. (I’ve also convinced Bob to serve as a contributing editor, though I have a feeling he still won’t be able to manage to write a post more than once or twice a year).

I hope you’ll all follow me here to RocketBomber.com, where I’ll continue my posts about Manga, and supplement those with even more thoughts and reviews on Anime, and additional coverage of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and general fandom. Or at least, that’s the plan.

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For a week or two I’ll post links on Comicsnob (for the expected weekly features) that point to the new posts here, but eventually you’ll need to update your bookmarks.

And give me a couple-three weeks, I’ll figure out the RSS feeds, too.

There are at least a dozen things I’d like to tweak. And as the slow march of time (like sands through the hourglass) progresses, I’ll get around to tweaking those. There are just two questions that really need to be answered, though:

Does it display text?
Why yes. Yes it does.

Does the comments thingy work?
Well it works for me; Near as I can tell, yep, that’s also a go.

Everything else is frosting. And we all love frosting. But (if I can mix my metaphors) the meat of the matter is cake. And the cake seems to be done.

Today is 29 June; we’ll be celebrating this as our anniversary later, no doubt, even though I posted some stuff a week ago (and more) and eventually, I’ll be bringing over some of the archives from Comicsnob.com, so there may be quite a few articles that predate this one — when that process is done. Oh, and there’s the Rocket Bomber Webzine (with Volume 1, Issue 00 slated to be released on September 1) —but more on that later. Today, the blog is enough.

And since The Blog works, hell, let’s start Blogging!

So, I’ll mess with the CSS and other formatting crap later, and I have a whole new CMS and mark-up to learn — though the selection of Textpattern was 99.999% because of the clean, intuitive text-based markup. I’m a writer, and a hack writer at that, and while I’m an even worse hack when it comes to web design — the design is something I can figure out, particularly if I give myself a few months, and ideally I’ll only need to do it once. Since I’m writing every day though, I selected a CMS based on how I write, specifically how I prefer to write and the whole heaping helping of bad habits that I started engraining (wait, is engraining a word?) back when I was just looking for ways to toss some bold and emphasis into old-skool email and chat programs.

Now, if someone would just invent a program that can parse parentheses, brackets, em and en dashes, with the odd semicolon and ellipses tacked on for good measure, then I’d be in business.