I’ve become disenchanted with the current site over the past two months and now I’m doing something about it. When I first started this comic site, I put together what I thought was the closest thing to a finalized product I could imagine. It wasn’t nearly good enough and I spent the next month tweaking it until I had the information I wanted on the site, presented in a manner that everyone could easily navigate. By the time I was finished, the template was nothing like I started and there were design flaws that continued to bother me for several months.

Over the past month, I’ve been gathering ideas on what makes the site better and what makes it worse. I started with a new layout, gave myself several days to think it over, and ultimately scrapped it in favor of something new. After repeating this process several times, I came up with something I think will work nicely for the site. It’s a very spartan design with few frills. It presents the information and gets out of the way. It’s also quite a bit more cheerful than the current design. While Variables is a quite serious story, I don’t feel the site needs to take itself quite that seriously to fit in with the mood. So, out are the golds and blacks and in are the blues and whites. It brightens up the site quite a bit and makes it more engaging to navigate, I think. Time will tell if readers agree.

One nice side effect of updating the site is that I finally have enough artwork to start showing more of it on the site and not buried in the comic. So, here’s a small sample of a work-in-progress banner that will be used for the new SelfCentEnt:

Look for the new site in a week or two. I’ll probably run out a semi-polished version and then spend the next few weeks adding the finishing touches as I get the time.

In other news, it looks like Sony has spent most of the past week regretting going over Geohotz for cracking the PS3 after the company removed its Linux capabilities. The Playstation Network has been down for nearly a week and now Sony is admitting that customer information, including credit card numbers, may have been lost during the break-in.

Whoops.

While I don’t condone hacking and people who spend their free time breaking into others’ networks, hacking a Playstation 3 shouldn’t have given anyone access to server-side critical information any more than Jailbreaking an iPhone should give me access to the iTunes database. It’s a TERRIBLE oversight by Sony to leave such a gaping hole in their “security” (term used loosely) and they deserve every bit of bad press they’re going to get over this situation. It looks like their PSN security was based around a closed system and not actually implementing proper security protocols to ensure that customer data remains safe. In today’s world, that’s just unacceptable behavior from a large corporation.

I just hope my credit card wasn’t one of the cards jacked. I honestly can’t remember if I had it on PSN or not and now that the network is down, I cannot check to find out (and I have yet to receive any email from Sony about the situation). Sigh.

Sony, you suck.

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