Web site news

Possible important notice

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Well, earlier today I had a lively e-mail conversation with Freehostia support, and determined that Comcast had somehow blocked my normal IP address from accessing Freehostia for some reason.

My hunch was that some computer at Comcast was down, and I wasn’t the only one to complain about inability to access Freehostia. Regardless, I can’t complain to Comcast because the connection isn’t mine to complain about, so unless this turns out to be a one-day problem, until further notice the strip will probably update at somewhat unpredictable times, determined by my ability to get to the library. That will probably mean 10 AM PT Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1 PM PT Mondays and Tuesdays (or even later), and who knows when on Sundays.

If I had a job and could thus afford an Internet connection of my own, if I had a better battery, if my computer stood by and hibernated properlyjlav ;amsdbjg.tlkhcnbxcoidsgddv9tew – if ANY of those conditions were in place I could give you a more reliable update schedule. Even if I had some way to time when Freehostia performed certain uploads and updated the MySQL database (so I wouldn’t have to worry about strips leaking early). But this pattern will probably hold for the next month until school starts up again, although the instant I get a paying job I will probably sign up for some sort of Internet service.

(You can take care of one of these conditions by buying a battery compatible with the Dell Inspiron B130 for me and e-mailing me for my snail mail address. Offers left in the comments may NOT be accepted.)

No, today’s strip isn’t on the website yet and will probably go up with tomorrow’s strip. It’s below for the curious. (Well, assuming you’re not on the LJ feed or permalink page, anyway.)

This is why I was considering dumping Freehostia.

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Figures. I wake up early enough to post the strip and Freehostia’s not working. I’m not resorting to posting it on Da Blog, though. That would smack of cheating just to get the strip back to posting at 11 PM PT, and there would be little reason for me not to just schedule a post.

EDIT: Okay, it’s still not working at 9:10 AM, so here’s today’s strip:

Why I may not be as productive today as I would have hoped

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Shortly before I was to begin writing a post, some woman came in to the library with two kids and gave one of them some sort of toy, ostensibly to distract him, but it makes too much racket for its effect on me to be lowered and his voice isn’t completely quiet anyway. Meanwhile, there are kids near the kids section and I can’t move there either, the only other place in the library with a table near a plug. The library in general is a bit more crowded than I’d like, but I’m not moving anywhere where I have to pay money.
I’m just looking longingly at my PW account, which shot up from about 9-10 cents, what, yesterday? to 15 today. I suspect my standard ad more regularly hitting two cents instead of one, and increased activity on the Premier ad, has something to do with it.
Ads should come to the web site on Monday.
Oh, it looks like the woman and her kids have left already…

At some point down the line, I’ll go into more detail about this. Not right now though.

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Project Wonderful’s top 30 highest bidding sites are all webcomics. That’s essentially every site that’s going for more than 10 dollars a day, and all but one of the over-$9 bidders. This being the exception.

In fact, every one of the top 10 is either a “skyscraper” (like my sidebar ad) or a “leaderboard”. (Somehow Menange a 3 manages to get impressive bid results from a banner, when my banner comes nowhere near competing with my skyscraper even though the former is in a far better position.) That’s got me thinking about potentially changing my “premier” ad to a leaderboard.

I know the really popular sites can afford their own ad services, and that webcomics often need advertising more than other sites, and such, but… damn.

(A skyscraper ad may be coming to Sandsday by the end of the week, though I still need to figure out how I would go about having both a master site and subsites.)

I’ll admit it’s probably not the best ad I could have come up with. But it’s close. Suggest improvements in the comments.

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Editor’s Note: On the day this post goes up, we are exactly six months away from the transition to digital television in the United States, and the outreach effort has been, to put it simply, a fiasco. Even its successes have been failures because it has ended up spreading some inaccuracies. As such, I have taken it upon myself to create a DTV PSA designed to alleviate the misconceptions and spread as much information, good and bad, as possible, in a short, simple, concise form. I timed myself reading it and came out to about three minutes.

(An image appears of a grandfather clock.)

Voiceover: Remember when you went from having to memorize a bunch of rules to figure out what the time was…

(An image appears of a modern digital alarm clock.)

Voiceover: …to simply being able to read the numbers off the clock?

(An image appears of someone surrounded by paper doing a lot of writing.)

Voiceover: Remember when you went from having to do your finances by hand…

(An image appears of someone working on an Excel spreadsheet.)

Voiceover: …to having a computer doing all the calculations for you?

(An image appears of a newspaper hitting a doorstep.)

Voiceover: Remember when your parents only had a few choices for learning about what was going on in the outside world?

(A screenshot of Wikipedia slides in on top of the last image. Other screenshots from blogs, informational web sites, and the like slide in on top of it.)

Voiceover: Now there are literally dozens of options and more coming every day.

(A generic landscape appears.)

Voiceover: On February 17, 2009, TV will make that move, and it will change forever.

(An image fades in of a television broadcasting tower.)

Voiceover: On that day, all full-power television stations in the United States are required to broadcast exclusively in digital television.

(The image now fades to a television set showing one of those stock images used to show how bright, crisp and clear the image is. As the voiceover continues, it shows a NASCAR race and a mosaic of a wide variety of programming.)

Voiceover: It will bring (usually) better picture quality, better sound, and even entire channels added to the current landscape.

(Fade to a diagram of two broadcast towers, highly lit up, with rings radiating from them. The television set continues to flash images in the lower right.)

Voiceover: And it’s actually a very simple switch. Most TV stations are already broadcasting in digital at full strength alongside their existing analog signals; some have already stopped broadcasting in analog.

(A calendar showing the date February 17 appears. One of the towers stops radiating rings and its lights go out. The television set continues flashing images.)

Voiceover: On February 17, the remaining stations will simply shut off their analog signals and will broadcast exclusively in digital from then on. That’s it. Most viewers probably won’t notice the difference, assuming everything goes as planned, and won’t have to do anything.

(An HDTV appears with a NO symbol over it, fading into a chart showing HD -> DTV, and DTV with two arrows leading to HD and SD.)

Voiceover: You don’t need an HD set. HDTV implies DTV, but DTV does not imply HDTV.

(A new diagram appears. On the left side, the words “CABLE OR SATELLITE” and below it, “DON’T WORRY!” On the right side, on the same line as “CABLE OR SATELLITE”, read the words “ANTENNA TV”.)

Voiceover: If you subscribe to cable or satellite, you won’t need to do anything, even if you don’t have a converter box; you’ll get exactly what you get now and might not even notice that anything changed.

(A TV fades in over the diagram, showing the same mosaic of images shown earlier, just barely slower and not as clear.)

Voiceover: Your cable operator or satellite provider will handle everything for you, although you should keep in mind that your cable operator or satellite provider is not required to bring you all the new channels opened up by digital, and may condense the digital signal so you won’t get the clearest possible picture and sound.

(The diagram fades back into focus. On the “ANTENNA TV” side of the diagram, it is cut in half lengthwise. On the top half fades in an image of an HD set; on the bottom half, an old-fashioned SD set. Below the HD set fade in the words “DON’T WORRY!” The SD set zooms into focus when the voiceover starts “even if it’s still SD…”)

Voiceover: If you get your TV through an antenna, you still don’t need to do anything if your TV is an HDTV, and even if it’s still SD you may not need to do anything.

(Image of someone flipping through a TV manual and finding the SPECIFICATIONS page.)

Voiceover: Check the specifications of your TV; they should be in your TV’s manual or on the box it came in.

(A line from the SPECIFICATIONS page zooms in, with “TV standard” in the left column and “NTSC” or “ATSC” in the right column.)

Voiceover: If it says it uses the “ATSC” standard, you’re all set.

(The letters “NTSC” fade in in big white type as the rest of the screen goes dark.)

Voiceover: If it doesn’t, and it only uses the “NTSC” standard, you won’t need to get a new TV or antenna or anything.

(Image of someone setting a digital converter on top of his TV.)

Voiceover: All you need is a digital converter, which you can get at a discount with a coupon from the federal government.

(Diagram of a broadcasting tower slowly moving away from a television set. As it moves away, the image on the TV becomes pixelated and eventually goes dark. The antenna starts to grow in size, and as it does the image comes back pixelated and then clear.)

Voiceover: Note that although any antenna will work with both digital and analog signals, signals further away from where you live will require a more robust antenna, even if you receive the analog signal fine now.

(A camera, a broadcasting tower next to the camera, and a TV appear. The camera shows a bunch of images, and the number 2 is on top of the tower. The TV is off. The 2 slowly changes to 19. The TV turns on, clearly showing the number 2, and shows the same images as the camera.)

Voiceover: Also, although you won’t notice any changes in the channel numbers on your TV, many stations will be broadcasting from a different channel from their analog signals.

(“14-51” appears in white letters on a mostly black background. With each conjunction, the screen changes, first displaying a UHF-only antenna near “14-51”, then to “2-13” near a VHF-compatible antenna.)

Voiceover: Most of these will be in the UHF band and you can get them using a UHF-only antenna, but some stations will broadcast in VHF.

(Appropriate screenshots from the website appear.)

Voiceover: To find out if you need a more robust antenna and if you can get away with making it UHF-only, log on to DTVAnswers.com (or whatever the site of the organization producing the PSA is). There, you can also find out if there are any low-power stations near you that will not be transitioning to digital.

How low a number can the strip get?

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Buzzcomix recently relaunched and I’ve set up Sandsday for the new platform. I kind of suspect Sandsday was kicked off Buzzcomix for some reason in the past, but it’s back on now and I encourage you to vote for it.

I’ve installed new vote buttons for both webcomic ranking services showing Sandsday’s rank on each. Funnily enough, with my one vote Sandsday shot from being just outside Buzzcomix’ top five thousand to being just outside its top five hundred. 5000… 500. Huh.

Note that even with my vote, I did not have quite as much success climbing up TopWebComics. As such, I should note that because TopWebComics’ vote image does not scale the font size of the rank like Buzzcomix, if Sandsday is outside TWC’s top 1000, the vote image will not appear to show the correct rank. Fortunately, you can fix that by, well, voting for it if you like Sandsday, and I would think that with just one more vote Sandsday would hit the TWC top 1000, considering with my one vote it’s inside the top 1500.

Also, I’ve started to fall behind on almost every site I don’t subscribe to the RSS feed of (including Ctrl+Alt+Del and any strip I’m reading on a preliminary basis for the purposes of posting on it), for a variety of reasons, so I’m setting up an RSS feed for Sandsday… sort of. This uses the new function of the Buzzcomix Reader, which basically means you have to sign up for a Buzzcomix account and make Sandsday one of your Favs. And I’m not sure if it would push through to any RSS reader. At any rate, there’s a button for it on Sandsday, for the interested.

No ads yet for Sandsday. Still thinking about the best way to do it…

I’d be more optimistic about the concept if I knew what the heck was going on in the demonstration.

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(From Penny Arcade Bogey Golf. Click for full sized… whatever the hell this is.)

I got an e-mail telling me my Freehostia account was now working shortly after I posted with today’s strip, so I guess that was unnecessary. On to other things.

Penny Arcade, like Ctrl+Alt+Del, has no forum dedicated to its own strips, Websnark has been reduced to Eric Burns popping in once a month to spout off on whatever’s making the rounds in geek culture, Tangents is still a homeless bum, and I know of no other blog that comments on webcomics as up-to-the-minute as those two. So I have no way of knowing for certain if Friday’s news post is a joke or not. It probably is, but it’s nowhere near April.

All I know is if it isn’t, it really screws up my plans, because I had been planning on PA being one of the two posts I was planning to make early in the week to make up for having no webcomic post this week.

Even if it is, I’m only really going to have two strips to work off of, so I’m probably reviewing another webcomic blog for the second instead, reviewing PA next week, reviewing one other comic the week after that, and maybe posting a third OOTS post the week after that.

And that’s assuming I don’t get too sidetracked by other things, like Buzzcomix’ recent relaunch, about which more later…