A couple of my recent ideas have been to create extra comics or secrets available only to your most enthusiastic fans. This is another of those ideas.
If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle, chances are that you’ve seen a Dilbert strip printed out and tacked to the side of one of the cubicles. Or a completely different comic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Dilbert. While reading comics online is a great experience, sometimes we come across a strip that we find so awesome we just have to print it so that we can hold it in our hands and keep it forever, and decorate our walls with them so that people can share our joy over this wonderful comic we just found.
Based on this, you could probably say that the people who print your comic are some of your biggest fans. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could reward those people with a special comic strip or drawing that only they could see?
Well, you can. And it’s not really that difficult, either.
Websites are normally built up from HTML and CSS – HTML is the content of the website, CSS is the formatting which decides how this content should be presented. Of course there is a lot more you should know about HTML and CSS if you’re actually using it, but that’s the core basic concept, really – and I assume that most of you know this stuff already, this being the Internet and everything. If you don’t, W3Schools is a great place to start learning.
Anyhow: You use CSS to decide what your website should look like. If you want different formatting for what the page should look like on the screen and what it should look like after being printed, you can fix that, too – it is possible to add different stylesheets for different media.
One of the things you can do with CSS is to make parts of your content invisible. Here’s an example.
… and that ends the example. Above this paragraph I added a paragraph that’s completely invisible. It contains some text, but you can’t see it. If I wanted to put a whole comic there, I could do that. If I wanted to put a couple of extra frames to another comic there, I could do that.
And then, I could add a separate stylesheet for printers, where those paragraphs and boxes were visible. Which means: When you printed one of my comics, you would get some additional content not available when viewing it on the computer screen.
I think that this would be a cool way to hide additional content. Just be prepared that unless you hint about it to your readers, this would probably go unnoticed for a while.
85 down, 15 to go. For those keeping score at home, that means I will have to write two ideas a day to be able to finish this before my deadline. At bit more than planned, but I’m optimistic – I’ve come too far to give up now.
Awesome idea. It depends how you publicise it, if at all. Also, your invisible paragraph showed up as plaintext in my RSS feed, so technical issues might be a concern.
I guess the display CSS doesn’t work in the RSS feed, then. Pity.
Yeah, technical issues would be a concern for anything related to technology. But I’m sure there’s some way to solve it. One thought I immediately think of is that this is WordPress, a CMS I don’t really know everything about, and I just put that paragraph into the post text. If I had coded this by hand by myself, I would probably have left the invisible paragraph out of the RSS feed. It’s not very difficult.
Of course, one still won’t hide this from browsers with CSS disabled (but there aren’t many left of those). And I assume some browsers will inform you that there is an invisible box here and offer to show it for you. Still, for 99 % of your readers, it shouldn’t be that difficult to create something that works.
I wouldn’t say 99%; tons of people use feed aggregators rather than reading the website.
Yes, of course, but if one were to actually create something like this, one would of course code it in such a way that the secret comic would not be included in the RSS feed.
Hm, feed aggregators? You mean scripts that fetch comics from websites instead of using the RSS feed? Okay, interesting, I hadn’t thought of that. But I’m sure there’s some kind of technical way around this. There always is.