Tutorials/Navigation Buttons
From CGWiki
Navigation Buttons by Ping
Navigation Buttons! Ya want em. Yes ya know ya do. Well sugah, (sorry about the cheesy accent) Guess what? Doin' em is dang easy!
- Firstly, you need to create the actual buttons themselves with an image editing program. Generally you'd want one each for the First Comic, Previous Comic, Next Comic and Today's Comic. If you want, you can also create one for Storyline Start, but that's another story.
- You can use most common image formats (GIF, JPEG, PNG) it doesn't really matter as long as you name em right. What do you name them? See here:
- First Comic - first_day.gif
- Previous Comic - previous_day.gif
- Next Comic - next_day.gif
- Today's Comic - last_day.gif
- Story Line Start - storystart.gif
- Now that you've named them right, upload them into your /workspace/images folder.
- Login in to SiteAdmin and trigger a full update. Voila! Navigation buttons!
Ghosted images
What do you do at each end (the start and the latest) where you have a link that points to something that does not exist? When you use the ***previous_day*** tag without an image and there is no comic to point at, the server does not add a link. If you are using a previous_day.jpg image, then it too will not be displayed.
That might upset the layout of your comic. If you use an intricate page design and it's important that images are in the right place, then the missing images may make your page look a little lop-sided. The answer? Ghosted navigation buttons!
To make a ghost navigation button, you simply create another button image that is the same size as the button it will replace but make it look a little different so that it's obvious to the reader that it's not a link.
For example: If you have a black box with a white arrow pointing to the left for your previous_day.jpg image, then you can make a black box with no arrow or with a dark gray arrow for the previous_day_ghosted.jpg image. The ghost image will take the spot of the normal image, but won't be a link.
All four navigation images can be ghosted as described in the tagtorial page.
Please note: The ***next_day*** on the indextemplate.html file does not seem to work with either the next_day.jpg or next_day_ghosted.jpg images. Don't bother putting the ***next_day*** Keentag on your indextemplate.html file since it'll never be used. You can link to the ghosted image directly by using <img src="/images/next_day_ghosted.jpg"> instead.
Things to Remember
Please note that ComicGenesis does not support the Bitmap (.bmp) format.
Write your extensions in lower-case. For example: previous_day.gif will work fine, whereas previous_day.GIF will be iffy.
Also make sure your images are not uploaded in ASCII format at they will not be viewable by browsers that way.
If after triggering your update and the buttons still do not update, reupload your dailytemplate, overwrite the old one and trigger another update. This should trick AutonKeen into updating all of the archives.
Note: Sometimes you will need to have more than 5 comics for your buttons to show up. No, don't ask me why, I didn't write AutoKeen. I merely help document it.
Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words! Happy Webcomicking! -Ping
