Multiplex - a comic strip about life at the movies
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Posts Tagged ‘Patrons Only’

 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (to the Multiplex website)

Those of you playing along at home will know that thanks to the Patreon backers passing the $600/month Milestone Goal, I’m redesigning the website to remove all third-party ads entirely and to accommodate larger strip images.

There is good news and bad news about that, though. First, the vegetables: The complete site redesign is going to be a little delayed. It’s a bit more work than I have time for, because of grad school, unfortunately. But I will get to it as soon as possible.

BUT… the good news is that as a temporary measure, I’ve removed the third-party ads from the comics pages (including the homepage), although they remain on other pages of the site because removing them would break the site layout. They’ll disappear in due time, though. This temporary redesign was the simplest solution, and it removes the ads from the vast majority of the website.

I’ve also increased the size of the current — and future — strips to 900px. That’s 25% bigger! I’ll be updating the older strip images, too, as time permits. This benefits ALL Multiplex readers, whether they read on the website, the RSS feed, or the Multiplex iOS appThe Milestone Goal was announced for 900px images, but I’ve settled on 960px wide for the new site. 900px is just the largest I can make them with the current site design. Other features of the new website include a responsive layout (to play better with mobile devices) and retina display detection (to provide even larger images to displays capable of showing them).

Thank you VERY much to all of the patrons at Patreon for helping make this happen, thank you to my programmer Daniel Farrelly for devoting so much of his time and work to Multiplex, and thank you for reading!

UPDATE: I’ve updated all of Chapter 34 to the 900px size now.

Second Patreon Milestone Goal reached!

Book_2_Patreon-goal_2

We’ve just hit the second milestone goal ($600)!

What this means is, once my patrons’ accounts are charged next (around the first of next month), MULTIPLEX WILL BE COMPLETELY READER-SUPPORTED AND DEVOID OF THOSE ANNOYING THIRD PARTY ADS. Thank you so incredibly much to all of the Patreon backers and anyone else who spread the word about the project (or Multiplex, really)!

Once I can roll out the reworked site, strip images will be significantly larger (most likely 900px wide), yet the website should still load a bit faster. My programmer Jelly and I are looking at making the site both responsive and retina-friendly at the same time, but those may take a while longer… so no promises for those just yet.

I would just yank the ads now, because I hate them, except that would screw up the site layout. Removing them is not quite as simple as it might seem, I’m afraid, and will involve a bit of a redesign, as I mention in the Milestone Goals sidebar over at Patreon.

When we reach the NEXT milestone goal ($1000): I will post (at least) four Multiplex Movie Reviews or other bonus comics per month here for patrons! So it will be allllmost like three strips per week.

If you’re not already a patron, head over to the Patreon page
and check out everything you get in return for you support!

Multiplex Chapter eBooks: the pre-release editions — and a word about Book Three

multiplex_ch31Announcing the pre-release editions of the Multiplex Chapter eBooks!

The “pre-release” versions don’t include any of the bonus comics that will find their way into the official Chapter eBook release or the print collections, because they don’t exist yet. They haven’t been formatted to fit each strip on its own page, either, but the commentary is new (and likely to change before the official/final release), so if you like the PDF eBooks because of the commentary and the high resolution vector art, you will enjoy re-reading the archives this way, too.

The pre-release eBooks are available exclusively to Patreon backers at the $3 level and higher.

Chapters 31 and 32 are available NOW (dig through the Activity Stream for links!), with future chapters coming roughly every month until I’m all caught up. I’m starting with Book Seven, and then I’ll go back to Book Six (a.k.a. the movie storyline), then Book Five — and moving forward, I plan to release future chapters shortly after they’re wrapped. I know this might sound a little weird. It makes sense in my head.

Books Three and Four will have to wait for the official releases, because it doesn’t make as much sense to me to do the pre-release edition only to replace them a year later.

Now that the Multiplex: There and Back Again Kickstarter is winding down… I want to set my sights on producing the bonus material for Book Three next (assuming sales of Book Two merit moving forward with the print collections).

So this summer, I hope to get started on the bonus material for the third print collection. But rather than launch a Kickstarter project that could take two years to fulfill, I’d like to use Patreon to cover the living expenses I’ve built into the first two Kickstarters (and badly underestimated). That way, when I do launch a Book Three Kickstarter, it is solely for the printing costs of the book and the cost of the Kickstarter rewards. Hopefully, that will mean rather than waiting almost two years for a book like with Book Two, it’ll only be a matter of months.

Multiplex is brought to you in part by the letters P, A, T, R, E, O, and N

Thanks (again) to all of the Patreon sponsors to date for helping reach the first milestone, allowing me to get rid of the leaderboard ad. Although the Patreon campaign is based on monthly subscription, I took the ad down early.

Special thanks are due to Andrew Hathaway at Can’t Stop the Movies, a film review and discussion site! Hey — don’t you like movies? Check them out.

One bit of news: Multiplex: There and Back Again is due to arrive at my apartment tomorrow! That means I’ll get the pre-orders up and running at the Multiplex Store in the near future. I want to make sure I get the Kickstarter rewards out of the way first, though, and with school started up again, that may take me a little while.