Omjii Blog Engine Preview

So I've been mentioning an "Omjii Blog System" for a long while now. In fact, the existence of an Omjii Blog System should be obvious if you're reading this right now. This blog is, after all, is sitting on Omjii.com. That's because this blog is actually the test bed for Omjii Blog System stuff.

So what is the Omjii Blog System? It's simple- a blogging engine derived from the Omjii Comic Engine running the main site. The Omjii Comic Engine that Jason and I wrote about a year ago started as a photo blogging engine that morphed itself into a webcomic engine once Chris, Jason, and I decided to start posting our doodles online. At some point, we realized that the Omjii Comic Engine very much resembled a blogging engine underneath- which makes sense, since a. the engine started life as a photo blogging tool and b. a webcomic is, in fact, a blog. So we started to experiment with extending the Omjii Comic Engine into a full blogging tool. Why? Why not?

Our goal isn't to face off against Wordpress or Moveable Type or Blogger or whatever. The point of writing the Omjii Blog Engine is purely academic- writing a content management system is a good exercise for coders. The nice side effect of this exercise, however, is that we might just end up with a nice, simple, useable little tool. Sweet. For now, two experimental blogs are running on the engine: this blog, and Emma Ricciardi's Emma Blog. In addition, Ana Kim's The WAHH! Blog forwards through Omjii to Blogger and will eventually be hosted here.

So! What does this engine entail for Omjii.com? Well, we'll be offering Omjii Blogs to people soon as the Omjii Blog Engine approaches completion. It ain't Wordpress, but the cool thing about the Omjii Blog Engine is that we will constantly be tinkering with it and adding cool new things to the bag of tricks it can do.

The introduction of Omjii Blogs is naturally going to mean some revisions to the main site design. Here's some concept doodles of what it's going to look like:

The first doodle shows two headers. The top header is the standard Omjii header that flies over the main site. The second header, however, is new. When you go from the main comic site to, say, the Emma Blog, the header of the site will magically change into the second, blog oriented header.

The second doodle shows an updated design for the second, blog oriented header.

Finally, the updated new main header is actually completed and ready to go live. We're just waiting on a few things before releasing it into the wild. It looks like this:

So those are some cool new things to expect in the coming weeks!