UYD Time LineMarch 1997We are still in March 1997. Glenn dug up all the historical info while Todd worked on the story plots, character cast page, and web searches for actual photos pertaining to Atsuta Shrine and Grasscutter. Todd finally came across a site somewhere deep within the non-indexed depths of the net which actually possessed photos of the 3 ancient imperial treasures, including Grasscutter. Immediately the images were incorporated into the site and copies were routed to Stan Sakai, who, coincidentally, was working on the last page of Prologue #2, where Yamato Dake pulled the sword from the tail of the giant serpent. Even with all his resources, Stan was still missing a visual representation of Grasscutter... and was just going to make something up for it. That was until he received copies of the Grasscutter Website for his review. Once he saw the sword, he immediately adapted it's design for use in the Grasscutter storyline. Once again, the UY Dojo proved to be an excellent source for Stan to benefit his UY comics. Also in March, the UYD welcomed aboard some new Hatamotos: Ruben Javier Arellano, Don "Dusty" Rhoades, Julie Miyamoto, J.R. Brown, Robert Laguna, Robert VanDuzee, and Jason Sawtelle. These new retainders were responsible for many of the plot synopses, interview transcriptions, and graphics that were displayed on the UYD. The UYD also welcomed DHC Marketing Rep Lou Bank among the ranks of the Hatamoto. He showed a great interest in working with the UYD in promotions and helped get the UYD website address published in all Usagi Yojimbo ads! Additionally, he helped promote the UYD and the Grasscutter Website over at the DHC site, and began to deliver exclusive info whenever he could. Lou was like a double-agent working for the Dojo! With Stan, Jamie, and now Lou working with the Dojo, we were truly a spoiled bunch. (Lou - what ever happened with the Usagi Tea Cups????). Glenn had suggested that Todd look into the idea of the UY Dojo becoming the "Official" Usagi site. So Todd contacted Stan, who immediately agreed to the idea. And so the first "Official" Usagi Yojimbo web site was born! The UYD's website address began appearing in each and every issue of UY. Traffic soared. Times were great. 1997 - 2001Five years passed. We hope to fill in this gap soon. In summary, during these 5 years, the Dojo enjoyed immense popularity. Dojo gatherings at various comic cons were set up, an official UYD T-shirt was made, the address "UsagiYojimbo.com" was secured, among may other milestones. Take a look at the site design just prior to it's major re-design in 2003-2004 by Aaron Digulla... 
September 2001Someone browsed the Analph comic store in Zurich and stumbles over a pretty high stack of Usagi Yojimbo books. Since they are incomplete and the dates in them suggest that they are out of print for years, now, he doesn't buy one. He buys Bone instead. He's still buying Bone but that's only because he hates it when he doesn't know how a story ends. November 2001The guy is back for his next dose of comics and the UY books are still there. He leafs through FIXME Can't find reference "uy-book5". He likes the clean style of the images, the impressive details and the calmness of the storytelling. He spends the few bucks to buy it because he simply likes furries. End of November 2001Roughly $300 later, he owns almost every story which Stan has ever published. That guy, called Aaron Digulla, was now hooked like so many before him who started to leaf through one of the comics of Stan Sakai. December 2001Aaron Digulla had always had a liking for written texts but he never had thought about writing himself, before. But somehow, the UY Comics changed this. In the middle of the month, he published the first chapter of his Pau Tai story line called FIXME Can't find reference "usagi1en" which tells the story of a strange priest called Pau Tai who appears in Usagis life. January-June 2002Aaron (or Philmann Dark as he calls himself when he writes -- it's not really a pseudonym; "Digulla" just sounds more like an insult when someone with an english accent says it) writes 15 chapters which can be printed on 250 A4 pages. Because his japanese skills are lacking, he becomes a frequent poster on the DojoBoard Forum asking for japanese words and names to use them in his stories. He dreams of a book to be printed... but he fears that this might give Stan nightmares, so he didn't approach him ... yet. Btw, Todd likes Aarons' UY story, so far :-) July 2002Aaron Worob on the DojoBoard Forum asks why the website hasn't been updated for so long? Well, we don't know but Todd contacts the two guys, who asked: Aaron Worob and Aaron Digulla a.k.a Philmann Dark. August 2002For some reason, Aaron Worob never gets back to Todd but Aaron Digulla does. 7. August 2002Todd tells Aaron Digulla the password for the UY Dojo -- not knowing what would happen next... 30. August 2002A good part of the UY Dojo is converted to XML by Aaron Digulla: Frequently Asked Questions, Usagi's World, FIXME Can't find reference "uyletters", UY Concordance (which no longer exists), The Stories, Grasscutter and many other pages as well. So what's the big deal behind XML? Aaron Digulla is a computer professionel, who works in Switzerland (usually at banks and insurances). He knows many different computer languages (around 30) and various computer systems and OSs. And he's the lazy kind of guy who likes it very much to see his computer work. That's why he's using Linux to work on the UY Dojo. When he wrote this, the descriptions for all UY comics, stories and characters were converted into XML. XML is much like HTML but there are tools, called transformers (for the geeks: I'm using XSLT), to convert XML into something else. HTML, for example. So now, we can say, "hey, a page which describes a comic looks like that" and "all comics are described here" and the transformer will create 154 HTML pages from two source files. Of course, if something changes (for example, the Dojowarp), then we just have to change one file, now, instead of hoping that we didn't forgot one of the 800 files which make up the UY Dojo... The various transformation scripts also do many checks to make sure that the results are OK without someone having to look at them -- what's the point in generating 800 files when you have to check each one afterwards to make sure they are all OK? The usual process is like this: He takes a webpage and runs a small editor macro over it (he's using jEdit) to clean the bad&broken HTML which the many HTML editors create. Then a common header and footer are added to make the file readable by the transformer. Now, the many remaining errors are fixed, the content is skimmed for being current, broken links are fixed, etc. and then the original is generated from the new XML file from now on. And when there are new pages or old ones are renamed, all he has to do is to change a few files and say "make" and then "update" to upload all changed files on the webserver. Life can be so easy when you know your tools... FIXME Can't find reference "uydhistory3" Some more technologySo what is Aaron Digulla using to do his magic? XML or: The World Could be Such a Nice Place Without DatabasesOne of my bosses once told me a story: "We once had to get a sorted list of data from our database. When we told the database to return us a sorted list, that took 70 seconds. When we told the database to dump the data and then piped that through sort, it took 2 seconds. Databases are evil. They are unwieldy, slow, break at odd times and make your life miserable. Like computers but more so. So what's this got to do with XML? Nothing. Almost Nothing. Most computer users (by number) think that the world out there is Windows. They send you word documents as attachments or HTML mail and complain when you tell them that you can't read it. So someone thought to do something about it. The result XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. XML looks a lot like HTML but with a difference: The words which you can use in HTML are defined by a standard (which M$ usually ignores; as it always does -- that's why so many web designers complain about Internet Explorer while the users of MIES don't understand what the fuzz is all about -- but I digress). In XML, you can define your own words. In HTML, you can use the word a to create a link to something. But the a-word (which stands for anchor and which is abbreviated to the first letter because the guys who made the standard are smart: They knew that this word would be used most often! After all, links is what the WWW is all about, isn't it?) is dumb: It doesn't know if the thing it links to is a text document, an executable or a web page (which is why so many download pages contain explanatory text how to force your web-browser to download something instead of filling your screen with garbage). In XML, you can define new words, like comic-link which is a link to a comic -- whatever that means. Then, you can create a file which is called XML Stylesheet or XSL which can be read by something that is called an XSL Transformer or XSLT. In that thing you can say "if you encounter the word comic-link, then do this..." In the case of the UY Dojo, it will put a link to a UY Comic in the web page which it is just generating. And the connection to the database? Something like that could be achieved with a database, too, but with many drawbacks: You would have to install the database everywhere while the XSLT programm is a single executable which is available everywhere: Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac, probably even on Amigas (shame on you if you don't know what an Amiga is!). XSLT allows to do many things that databases can do but it doesn't hurt as much. And with everyone jumping on the XML bandwagon, there might be a time when I will be able to read a Word document on my Linux box without having Office installed. When M$ for once follows the rules which the standard dictates. Unlikelier things have happened. Unfortunately, the witnesses are unreliable. Putting it all togetherHere is the complete list of tools which I use: GNU Make, ImageMagick, xsltproc, rsync and The Gimp. Make holds it all together: The Makefile is a file which tells which file depends on which other file. For example, it says that $(DEST)/news.html depends on news.page and page2html.xsl. Whenever news.page and page2html.xsl change, then $(DEST)/news.html must be created again with the commands which are also in the Makefile. Many images in the UY Dojo have small thumbnails for preview. The XML source files contain img words which have two attributes: the picture and the thumbnail. From this, XSLT creates a makefile with all thumbnails and every thumbnails depends on its picture: When the picture changes, the Makefile will update the thumbnail with the help of the convert command out of the ImageMagick package. The package also provides us with the sizes of all images so they can be put into the HTML files so it doesn't flicker that much when the pages are loaded because the web browsers will be able to allocate the right amount of space for the images after the text of the page is loaded and it starts with the images. rsync is a tool which can copy files over a network, like FTP but better: If will make sure that the files and directories are the same afterwards. Also, when using SSH, one doesn't have to specify passwords -- rsync can then connect to a remote computer without manual interaction! And it is kind of the internet: Only the parts of a file which have changed will be sent over the internet keeping traffic low. Plus it will delete any files which have been deleted here so I can be sure that I can't forget to delete some obsolete junk on the web server. And when the need arises to create a new image for the UY Dojo, I'm using Gimp. Todd had to use a pirated software to do this, Gimp is free (as in freedom *and* in free beer). Gimp can do most of the things that Photoshop can do and that's more than enough for me. And when they can keep the pace, then Gimp will be more powerful than Photoshop by the end of 2002. Know your tools. - Aaron Digulla a.k.a. Philmann Dark  |
History of the UYD 2