Web site news

Still here, just getting the next 50+ years of my life set up

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I feel like apologising to myself for not updating Da Blog more often. The comic strip, of course, has been updating every day come hell or high water, but it hasn’t grown at all. Not only do I not have any regular readers who don’t click on a link to arrive, but the ones I do have, who click on links? Most of them don’t look at any other strips. (Maybe that’s typical, and I just feel it more acutely because my strip is so small. I don’t know.)

There has been quite a bit going on in my life, though nothing earth-shaking. I haven’t been able to get any real job on-campus, which is a little distressing when you consider that, from what I’ve been told, I won’t be eligible for federal work-study funds for an on-campus job unless I get one by the end of this year. I’m sort of cursing myself for not being more aggressive and less procrastinating at the beginning of the year. Another part of the problem is that I’m not eligible for many if not most of the jobs I see listed on the primary on-campus job listing service, sometimes because I don’t have prerequisite courses, sometimes because I don’t have a driver’s licence (my own contribution to slowing global warming and probably the one most people should take instead of just getting a car that pollutes less, assuming they have good mass transit), sometimes because I don’t have “experience” even if I would do well once I had the job, and sometimes because I’m not a freak of a student. (And sometimes in the past I would disqualify myself because my interpersonal skills – not to mention my handwriting – are… iffy, to understate tremendously. Then there are the two jobs I applied for, was told I would be contacted to set up an interview, and never heard from again.) I’m a little skeered that my life is going to devolve into me becoming the stereotypical geek living in his parents’ basement with no job and spending his entire life playing video games and surfing the net.

I like to think I’m too smart for that, which brings me to my other point: my quest to determine what I will spend my college experience studying. I applied for college with a history major, because that was the academic field I already had the most experience and interest in. But now I’m interested in everything but history. Here’s a list – possibly incomplete – of other majors I’m considering or have considered: economics, English (Creative Writing), psychology, communication (or journalism or a variant), public affairs, math, anthropology, sociology, business economics, finance, and computer science. (This last one I started considering after how quickly I picked up CSS and PHP on my own time for my web site and comic strip respectively, which gives me a pretty spiffy-looking web site for an amateur effort. Compare the home page – link at top right of Da Blog’s sidebar – with my intentionally-retro-looking street sign gallery. In fact, at some point I need to try converting my sidebar to PHP so it can be dynamically updated.) As I write this I just got done meeting with an advisor who suggested “liberal studies” – an anti-major that can be oversimplified to “take whatever you want”.

Oh, and my computer has fallen all to pieces again. This happened rather suddenly over the weekend, and wasn’t even really caused by me banging on my laptop this time. First the sound card failed for no reason, and now all of a sudden the computer won’t boot all the way and the CD-ROM drive isn’t working so I can’t go into the Windows Recovery Console and fix what I figure is probably a comparatively minor problem.

I’m still hoping to get someone to help on writing up movies for my 100 Greatest Movies Project, although between Da Blog’s sluggish readership and the fact I don’t intend to pay anyone for it, I’m skeptical about the prospects of getting anyone anytime soon. I’m actually starting to consider a system where I would start putting up the list first and the write-ups later, except for the ones I think are perfectly ready as-is. But even if you aren’t up for the challenge, if you can lead me to someone who is I would greatly appreciate it.

So that’s basically it, although I would like to see if you have any advice. Look over what I already have on Da Blog and the web site, as well as the list of majors above, and tell me if anything leaps out at you.

Given the subject matter of the current strips, this is a little interesting…

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Okay, this is huge news. No, HUGE.

Over the past 24 hours, I have received two hundred and seventeen visitors. That is more than my counter had registered in the entire previous history of Sandsday.

What happened? I’m not 100% certain, and I’m trying to learn details. Apparently someone added strip number 59 to StumbleUpon and people have been directed to the site against their will.

(I personally would have preferred if they had “stumbled upon” the front page, but oh well.)

If you happen to have discovered the site from StumbleUpon, I encourage you to check out (and rate, for that matter) the rest of the site. There’s a streetsign gallery, a definitive greatest movies list you can help get off the ground, and more. And don’t forget to give me your feedback on the strip from the Feedback link or by e-mailing me at mwmailsea at blogspot dot com.

Oh, and whether you liked or disliked that particular strip, I’d advise you to come back tomorrow. I’ll have a little easter egg for you in the day’s strip…

A spot of advice for anyone who wants to run a website

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One of my biggest pet peeves is when the proprietor of a site that I enjoy and check regularly for updates falls off the face of the earth. Usually they give the half-assed explanation that “My schedule has gotten too busy to keep updating.”

Fine.

But when you create a web site, and you give your audience an expectation that you are going to keep adding new, interesting content, you are set for life. If you’re going to stop updating, take down everything that gives the impression you’re going to keep updating except your update records, and even there make clear that you’ve stopped updating quite so regularly. If you announce a scaled-down regular update schedule, hold yourself to it, because the longer the time between updates, the bigger penalty there is for missing it. A daily update schedule tolerates several days’ worth of missed updates. A weekly update schedule can drop off for a week, maybe two. A monthly update schedule causes problems with the first missed month, and there is no excuse for a missed update on a yearly schedule.

Even if you stop completely, you can’t stop completely, especially if you’ve been linked to from elsewhere on the Internet at sites whose proprietors are probably also too lazy to keep their links up to date, and especially if the information you provide is potentially volatile and liable to change with the news. If something goes wrong, or if your host changes everything, or if (as with Freehostia even on their free service) you have to keep renewing your website’s existence, you owe it to your readers that everything goes off without a hitch. Even if your site is fairly automated.

Especially if your website is fairly automated.

I just signed up for buzzComix, which ranks webcomics into a “top 100” based on people’s votes. The primary means of voting, as near as I can tell, is following links from the sites themselves. You have to open up a secondary panel, from a tiny button, which you can still be convinced doesn’t exist if it doesn’t pop up right away or at all, to vote from within buzzComix itself. This means buzzComix pretty much becomes a contest between those sites that are interested in flooding it with votes. Of course, that would probably happen anyway, but bCx doesn’t seem particularly interested in stemming that tide.

Or, in fact, with anything anymore. There are signs of abandonment everywhere – both from the proprietors and from the users. There’s a thread on the bCx forums calling for a fix for “vote/rank images”, referring to some function that is no longer working and whose images have been taken down. The thread dates to March 2006. It’s possible this was an intentional permanent removal, but apparently no one decided to send the word: after the initial post, the original poster bumps it about twice a month as the only posts, eventually making fun of itself by labeling the bumps as “monthly/semi-monthly bump”. After seven and a half months, the original poster laments the lack of “visible means of support”, followed – after ten months! – by the first post from someone that’s not the original poster, seconding the lament. That’s followed by several other calls for the problem to be fixed (including a note that the function in question is “kind of standard” on other similar sites, despite me not knowing what it is even after checking buzzComix’ main competitor, a problem I have with that site since it provides no help whatsoever, not that bCx’s FAQ is much better) and a recognition (by June) that the site is abandoned.

The kicker: Were it not for a recent onslaught of spam, this thread – last post July 2007 – would be very near the top of the bug report forum. That’s before we get into the current news post, which wishes us a “happy summer“… in April 2007. The current news post is nearly a year old!

What’s more, bCx’s ads routinely advertise the ability to advertise on them… indicative of no one actually taking them up on their offer. A look at their ad calendar shows that many of the same comics have spots in the ad rotation day after day. This is especially distressing when you consider that the ads advertising the ads claim that you can buy an ad “for only $1”. You have to buy them in multiples of 5, and most webcomic artists aren’t making money off their webcomics and have to have a life too, but… dude. That’s a bargain.

If only I could be certain that bCx is still “rapidly growing” and still gets “over 10,000 unique visits a day with over 30,000 page views a day” that they claim. That would essentially be buying me an easy onslaught of traffic for a day. If you read today’s strip you’d know why. Instead, I plunge into bCx rather tentatively, wondering if anyone is still listening…

I’d ask you to vote for me here, both for bCx and for Top Web Comics (which doesn’t look to be quite as abandoned as bCx, in part because it doesn’t have much forum support or news at all, but still seems to be running mostly on autopilot), but I think you should see the strip first and decide for yourselves. If you like it, vote for it using the new links on the strip page itself. If you don’t like it, click the Feedback link and let me know why or e-mail me with your reasons why. Heck, even if you like it, let me know what you think of it and how I can improve. (I’d advise you to read some of the strips before this one first, though.)

At the corner of Update Street and Web Site Avenue

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In case you haven’t noticed, the strip is back to normal now. Today, however, I want to add something else to the web site.

The Internet is an amazing place. When I discovered that there were sites dedicated to nothing but obsessing over America’s roads and highways, I became convinced that there was a website for anything on the Internet. So when I couldn’t find a site cataloguing street signs in the same way as roads – something that can show a lot of variety – I decided to make one.

(Can someone tell Freehostia that I’d really love a way to select several files at once for upload rather than have to go through Browse box after Browse box? I’m sure FTP would be one way that’s already in place but I fear complications…)

Also, I made a new addition to the Around the Horn Drinking Game.

Hmm. This could be a problem.

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I don’t know if anyone else is having this problem, but they probably are; the strip is currently returning a “can’t connect to MySQL site” error. I can access the database but it’s not loading on the page itself. Well, when it comes back there’ll be a new strip.

If it’s still down in the morning I’ll post the strip on Da Blog.

Apparently he rolled a save of 1. (If you get it, and you’ve already heard this, you’re probably groaning.)

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Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died on Tuesday. If, like me, you weren’t around in the 80s when D&D was one of the biggest fads on the planet, you’ve probably never heard of him, and if you’re neither a fan nor one of those “D&D=Satanism” freaks, you probably think it only matters to antisocial geeks. You’d be wrong.

Freehostia’s security certificate is back to normal. Since today’s strip is up really late, tomorrow’s will be up around noon PT, Saturday’s will be up as early in the morning as possible, and Sunday’s will be back to being up at 11 PM PT.

Expect delays when reading comicked strips

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The next strip will not be up until sometime in the morning, possibly as late as 11 AM PT, though more likely no later than 8. This is because Freehostia’s security certificate has a problem, and while I ignored it long enough to get a strip up last night, I don’t want to risk it causing any real problems.

UPDATE 12:24 PM PT: The new strip is finally up, though Freehostia is not back to normal (though it may just be IE7’s cache). Tomorrow’s strip will go up no earlier than 8 AM PT, and strips will continue to go up at around noon PT until Freehostia is back to normal. If it’s not back to normal by one week from today, I’m going to be seriously considering dumping Freehostia.