Progressive Ruin 4.0 is on the air!

And so there you have it…the all-new style for Progressive Ruin Industries dot Edu backslash HomeLoanOffers. This new template for the site should function a little better with different sized screens, I’m certainly hoping. (A note to folks using their cellphones…clicking on the three buttons and selecting “desktop site” (or however it works in your configuration) will improve the appearance. Sorry, that’s a side effect of me forcing the sidebar to its proper position for tablet users.)

I’ve also made a few cosmetic changes, like that new banner up there. I can fairly easily slot new images in and out of there as I see fit, keeping the banner a little less static than the exact same one I used for the past 16 years.

Also changed is the sidebar icon, where I increased the size on the darned thing, finally. Y’know, when I did that very first icon, lo these many decades ago, I just cropped and sized the pic almost at random, eyeballing the size I wanted for the page at the time. It’s only by pure chance that the dimensions were 131 by 150 pixels…that was not a conscious decision. The new icons are now 196 by 255, a totally deliberate and thought-out choice. Here you can see the difference, using this week’s icon, the charming and not terrifying at all Sluggo Doll…old tiny style on the left, JUMBO FAMILY SIZE on the right:

And this means we’ll be shifting to 4-per-row on the icon archive page. I’m sure after a while I’ll start wondering “how did I ever keep using such small images for this?”

Another small change is that the comments and category links are now at the bottom of each post, instead of at the top. It is possible to switch those back to the top, if that’s really bothering anyone. It kinda half-sorta want them at the top of the posts myself, since sometimes the category link is itself part of the gag I want you to see before diving in. I’ll think about it. It requires some style sheet shenanigans, and frankly I’ve done enough of those for this site already.

The links in the sidebar have had some minor tweaks and additions…I now have a link to America’s most valuable comic book news site, Does This Comics Have Staples, which somehow I didn’t have before. The links I had there before have all been moved to the Links page, and the links that had comprised this page previously have been saved to a local file I can fiddle with as I have time. I’m loathe to dispose of the record of all those links entirely, despite the immense linkrot, as that page may be one of the few records of some of our fallen blogging comrades. I’ll see what I can do about making it into some kind of archive.

A couple of final things: there’s now a button that appears on the right that will take you back to the top of the page once you scroll down a bit. And, at the very bottom, there’s a numbered page navigation tool. Currently 604 pages on the site! …That’s too many.

There are still some minor tweaks and fixes I’ll have to adjust over time, I’m sure, but..it took me long enough to change, and I’m glad I did.

In the title of this post, I call this “Progressive Ruin 4.0,” so let’s go over the previous versions:

Progressive Ruin 3.0 should be familiar, I mean, this is what you were looking at just a couple days ago:

This was the site’s appearance from 2010 to 2026, as I switched from the Blogger blogging system to WordPress.

Progressive Ruin 2.0 was the initial version of this incarnation of the site:

…from its launch in 2003 ’til its replacement in 2010. This was the Blogger period, using Google’s blogging tool to publish to my own domain. Except when it didn’t work and you couldn’t update the page for hours at a time, and that happened once too often and I made the switch to WP. I do miss the livelier sidebar I had there, with links to specific posts that I wanted to highlight. Plus, my “since 1969” tagline at the top of the page would randomly pick from a list every time you reloaded, versus me updating it once a week now.

And Progressive Ruin 1.0, which you probably didn’t see unless you happened to be a personal In Real Life friend of mine (or you followed the link from some computer magazine that featured the site…no, really):

…and this ran from 1996 ’til…well, I’m not sure when. The Wayback Machine has captures listed going to 2003, but none of those seem to work, and I think that page was gone before that. Anyway, it was mostly a page for our mini-comics concern, plus links to friends pages, and in-jokes, and Horrible Eyesores (really awful desktop patterns I created) and so on. An interesting thing, my “What’s New” pages were kind of a proto-blog, where I just kinda rambled on about stuff while also telling you what I’ve changed on the site recently. Here’s an archive from 1999, where none of the images seemed to have made it, but you can get a flavor of what I was up to.

So that was the blogging about blogging is a sin-iest post I’ve ever made. Now that my site update fun is, with any luck, mostly over, I can finally get back to what this project is really about…longform essays comparing Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder with Frank Miller’s The Spirit.

Thanks to everyone for your patience while I duct-taped this comics blog back together, here in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Six, and with any luck I’ll have many more years of comics blogging to come! I hope you’ll all join me!