John Freeman recently discovered The Harvey Mercheum, and posted a nice review on his venerable British comics blog, downthetubes.net. You can see the full post here:
WebFind: Harvey Mercheum, a growing Harvey Comics resource
Thank you for the kind words John!
I have been meaning to watch this series of videos about turning a hobby into a business, but I have been that wonderful combination of sick and busy, so I have not gotten to it yet. After reading this blog post, I am not going to bother:
Continue reading →Freelance artist and writer Andy Fish has doubled down on his commitment to the Harvey Mercheum. I mentioned before how he added a link to the Mercheum to his website. Andy has now written a very nice blog post about his encounter with corner booth 143 at TerrifiCon 2022, you can read it here:
THE HARVEY MERCHEUM – A Celebration of Harvey Comics!
I have updated the “As Featured In:” section of my author information to include this post. Thanks again to Andy Fish, I hope to see you in November!
One of the decisions I had to make when creating the Harvey Mercheum website was whether to exhibit original art. It was tempting, but I knew that original art collectors tend to be very secretive about what they own. I also assumed that for every comic produced, there was a piece of original art, whether it still existed or not. This meant that resources such as the Overstreet Price Guide could be used as a checklist for what original art should exist, and could therefore be collected.
Continue reading →I missed acknowledging World Wide Web Day last year, sorry. As the Web turns 32 years old, visit the World Wide Web Foundation website, and don’t miss their post about young people changing the world!
#WideWebDay #ForTheWeb
I have mentioned before that the Harvey Mercheum website uses the Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help ensure reliability and security. I have also mentioned that all content created for the website is stored in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I recently read that these two services are joining forces in a unique and creative way to help increase reliability of the Web:
Cloudflare and the Wayback Machine, joining forces for a more reliable Web
I am proud to be associated with these great services, and am excited to see what other collaborations might happen in the future.
I’m glad I am not the only one to worry about such things. Back when I first started the Harvey Mercheum website, a double greater than symbol was the title separator. I do not recall if I chose that, or if it was a default, either in WordPress itself, or in the Suffusion theme I used originally. I think it was when I was setting up Yoast that I changed it to the vertical bar, also known as the pipe. According to this article from Search Engine Journal, I made a good choice:
For those of you who have more free time on your hands, The Intelligent Collector magazine just published a great checklist of five ways to improve your collection:
Long-time readers of the Mercheum Blog may recall that Intelligent Collector interviewed me back in 2017.
Sorry for not posting last weekend. I am very fortunate, in that I am still employed, and my employer gave me the equipment I need to work from home. The trick is, now that I am spending forty hours a week sitting in my chair, staring at my monitor, I really don’t want to spend my free time doing more of the same, even if it is for my projects not work. It took me about a week to get used to working from home, hopefully I will find a work/life balance that allows me to enjoy working on the Harvey Mercheum website again.
Continue reading →Earlier this month, I read this post about accessibility testing:
Beyond automatic accessibility testing: 6 things I check on every website I build
Step five makes the point of not conveying information with color alone, and goes on to cite hyperlinks as an example. Hyperlinks should be underlined to easily differentiate them from normal text. I realized that the Harvey Mercheum website was just using color to indicate a hyperlink, and decided to implement underlines. After some experimentation, I decided to only do this for the “content area” of the pages, in other words not the menus, sidebars or footer.
Once I decided upon the underlines and was already working with the website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), I wanted a clearer way to indicate whether the hyperlink was internal or external. I mentioned early last year about how I checked to make sure all internal links open in the same tab, and external links open in a new tab. I read this post on wpmudev:
How to Style External Links in WordPress Like Wikipedia
Then, rather than worry about licensing an icon, I found this way to create one on the fly as a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG):
I love learning new (to me) technologies such as CSS, and I am always looking for ways to improve the Harvey Mercheum website. What do you think of these changes? Leave a comment below, or use the Contact the Curator form to let me know!Featured image credit: Andreariverac [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
