Snow by Night

Almanac Reference: Currency, Guilds, Manitou

Jassart is wandering the town randomly annoying people in Chapter 6 Page 10. Or does he have pressing business with the alchemist? Hard to tell with Jassart. To see a peek at Wednesday’s page, please vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics.

So much news to go through today. First off, the Art Contest. The victors of Round 1 (the Sweet 16) are Minuiko, Laura Hollingsworth, Cristina Marin, Rein Eire, Melissa Teo, Amasugiru, Jesse Bechtold, and Shawna Alkira. Congratulations! I also want to thank Li Mei Ren, Delphina, Jennifer Zyren Smith, Pchoberry, NausicaaHime, Jose Ortiz, Manou Azumi, and Jennifer Middleton. Your art was splendid. Thank you so much for entering our contest.

We have four new contests to decide. Voting is now open. Good luck to all of you!

This weekend is Zenkaikon. We’ll be there with Chapters 1-4, as well as prints, and buttons. Our newest button is “I’m Fluent in Metaphor”. These words by Mathilde were very popular at Katsucon where we sold out of them.

Our last big piece of news is the site redesign. For that, I’m turning the journal over to Diane.

H, Diane here! You may have noticed a dramatic change in how things look around here. Our conversion over to PHP is finally here, with continual tweaks to be added as we go. One big improvement is the added Journal entries beneath each Story page – now you can feel free to comment on your favorite pages in the Story archive as you read through! Each Story page has been enlarged to a width of 750px in the new layout, too. We also have updated Share/Follow buttons on our sidebar so you can help spread the word of Snow by Night. If you have any suggestions, or notice any issues with the new site (I’m only human!) please let us know so we can continue to improve!

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Hello, everyone! Diane here, reporting in while Eric and Brittany are preparing for Katsucon this weekend. If you’re attending, please stop by to say hello and check out our books, buttons, and prints for sale!

Since Eric’s unavailable to do his usual write-up for the Almanac entry this week, we decided to review the existing entries and make some improvements. I’ve added a number of images to the Almanac entries that discuss things shown in the comic so far, and made a few tweaks here and there to fix word choice and order.

In Diane-related news, I’ve been working on the site’s redesign and hope to add some great new features soon. We do have plans to add the Journal’s Comment section to each Story page in the archive, along with plans to bring you bigger, better views of the Story pages once the redesign widens our content area to give us more space. Are there any specific features you’d like for us to add? Please let me know in the Comments here, and I’ll see what magic – I mean, what alchemy I can work!

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We hope you all had a wonderful New Year celebration. Our colorist, Naty Baaklini, created today’s holiday sketch of Ald, the Grumpest Elf. Also, Brittany has prepared a holiday special for everyone. She has turned her holiday sketches into desktop wallpapers (five sizes: 728×1024, 1280×1024, 1680×1050, 1920×1080). You can get them as gifts for donating to Snow by Night. Just follow the link on the sidebar to the right. Pages resume on January 7!

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No almanac entry this week. Instead, I’ve got a couple announcements. First, in response to feedback we received through the comments, Naty and I have made a few tweaks to Law of the Riverside Part 2 to make it a bit clearer which scenes are flashbacks. We shifted from the blue tone to sepia, removed the panel border, and gave the words a brownish tinge. We believe this should clear up any confusion as to the flashbacks and improve readability of the vignette. We’ll get to part 1 in the near future.

Second, on Wednesday, we uploaded the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for the website. You can see the links to them down at the bottom of the page. When we opened the online store (hurray, we have a store!), I needed to create some policies to cover my rear. First up is the Terms of Use. It covers things like don’t steal our stuff, don’t hack our site, and don’t be abusive to other commenters. It also makes clear that the site is provided on an “as is” basis and the update schedule is a guide and not a guarantee. The second is the Privacy Policy. In short, we have to collect some information to provide you services on the site and for analytical purposes, but we will not sell your information to other parties. I recommend you give both a read.

Thank you all for your support. We couldn’t do this without you.

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Almanac References: Maison, Nightwork, Ouah

Chapter 5 Page 5 is up. Mathilde goes to see Blaise. We haven’t seen Blaise’s apartment yet so we’re in for a treat. I hope you can hear the Jaw’s theme music when you read this page because the sharks are circling Blaise. To see a preview of next Monday’s page where Mathilde makes a discovery, vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics. And now, I’ll hand things over to Diane for a huge announcement.

TAH-DAH! The Snow by Night Store is finally here! It took quite a bit of code wrasslin’ and some sharp shootin’ against tricky e-store sites to get us here, so I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor. In the store, you’ll find the first three chapters in wonderful full-color print, prints of each of the main characters and the cool alchemical gun, as well as a dozens of buttons. Those prints come in a variety of sizes so be sure you’re looking at the size you want when you order. The colonial slang buttons are some of our best sellers at conventions.

I spent most of the long weekend sick in bed, and I’m still a bit wobbly, but it’s a happy relief to be able to finally share the Store with you.If you notice any errors or bugs in the site code, please do point them out to me so I can fix them. I’ve scoured the site myself, so hopefully that’s a non-issue, but when you’re manually updating hundreds of pages, human error can catch you unawares.

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Hello all! My thanks to Diane for the Webpage updates on Friday. Did you find her new page? The present she left for you was just adorable. The new page is now present on the nav bar across the top. It’s Extras. This is where we will be posting our fan art submissions and various other goodies that will be cropping up in the near future.

As part of our Fan Art Rendez-vous, Brittany received a lovely sketch of Mathilde with Fan by Nadja. To see more of her fine work, check out her Tumblr and Deviantart site.

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Hi everyone! Webmaster Diane here, reporting in for Journal duty. I know there’s supposed to be an Almanac update today, but I told Eric to sherry off so I could update a bunch of our graphics.

The most obvious update you’ll see is a font change. Eric and I have been frequently complaining to one another about Caswallon’s surprise swirl attacks, where we’ll be happily typing up a new header and suddenly – BAM! One of the letters turns out to be ridiculously swirly and it completely doesn’t fit with the rest of the font. We were jumping through hoops to dodge the surprise swirl attacks when we realized, uh, this is our site and we can change the font whenever we want to. So we have! Introducing our new BFF (Best Font Forever) Cochin-Archaic. I have to admit that I didn’t like Cochin at first, but it’s grown on me… mostly because it doesn’t attack me with unexpected lettering issues. I’m the kinda gal who appreciates that.

The other update is not obvious – yet. I’ve got a new page in the works and it’s going up tonight, but it won’t be linked anywhere in the site until Monday’s update. There’s a teensy bonus for anyone who decides to go a-huntin’ for it.

Also, if you haven’t yet voted for Snow by Night on Top Web Comics, please do so! Voting incentive at the moment is a sneak peek of Law of the Riverside, Page 2.

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Hello everyone! Diane and I are continuing to work on website improvements. So instead of an almanac entry this week, we’re upgrading the Links page. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time. I’ve broken the links into two sections – one for comics and one for gaming. I’ve asked Diane to add a lot of new links for us. These links include Paradigm Shift, Erstwhile, Baldman Games, and Going Last.

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