Waffle

Rocr.net had 211051 pageviews in February, coming from 9586 unique visitors measured on a by-month basis. The pageviews are up 70,000 compared to January but the uniques have contracted a bit, by almost 300. The ROCR re-runs on Drunk Duck earned 7110 pageviews, which is about the same as they did in the two previous months.

The Chronicles of the Witch Queen website and the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archive on Modern Tales earned about 23,000 pageviews together, based on statistics from Project Wonderful (making this a very rough guess, but MT/WCN's internal statistics are less useful for month-by-month data).

In all, my little empire earned nearly a quarter of a million pageviews in the past month. Most of the extra pageviews were earned by paid advertising, because while there are plenty of opportunities for free publicity, such as joining topsite lists, contributing to forums, exchanging links or simply asking for a mention and a link, they involve putting in time and effort that I cannot spare at the moment. It's hard enough for me just to write and draw the comic at the moment.

Next month, I will know if the paid advertising was cost-effective. I spent about $ 100 out of pocket, so if I made more from that in February through Webcomics World, I'll be doing good. Beyond that, it's simply nice to have my comics read by many people, so if end up making a modest loss, I won't cut my advertising altogether, though I probably will reduce the budget again.

I am somewhat concerned about the drop in uniques on ROCR.net, though these will be offset by new readers in places where I can't really count them. The uniques are a measure of my longer-term readership and therefore the longer-term health of the comic. So I will try some advertising on new locations, and if I do find the time, to put some work into unpaid publicity like joining a topsite. Targets for next month: 12,000 uniques, 1/3 million pvs.

Below, if this works right, is John Cage's 4' 33", in a lavish production:

[Edit: Evidently not. Just click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E - We'll wait for you to come back.]

I'm sure there are many things that could be said in Cage's favour. I cannot actually think of them, but I'm sure they exist. However, I myself see this performance as a sign of the complete atrophy of quality control in the modern classical music scene, where pretending to like the indefensibly pretentious and awful is sufficient, and actually liking music a sign that you are hopelessly unhip.

Perhaps one could make this work. For instance, you could suddenly break into Rick Astley after three minutes, treating this with all the respect it deserves. You could announce afterwards, "Well, wasn't that nice. I'm sure we can all feel very cultured now, now that we actually convinced ourself that something so stupid was worth putting on and paying all these highly talented men and women to be here for. Right, let's remind these people what good music is. Pull out the Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto scores from last night's concert." You could break into one of Gilbert and Sullivan's songs poking fun of pretentiousness.

Just don't break into any more songs by John Cage.

Last year when Aggie was drawing Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, the size of the images gradually expanded from a width of 560 pixels to, eventually one of 648 pixels, with proportional but varying height. To make things more consistent, I have remastered the pages before Aggie's stint to that same width, but I want to test them before uploading them to the website, to see if the dithering has turned out right and if the pages haven't turned out too heavy (they're at around 200 KB per image these days, which I think is pushing things a bit for webcomics). So I'm posting some of them here to see if they work and look good on various browser/OS combinations. The preview images are scaled down by WordPress, but clicking on them will bring up the full web images:

Page one, Jpeg, 250 KB

Page 15, PNG, 204 KB

Feral page 32, PNG, 200 KB

Feral page 40, PNG, 128 colours, 228 KB

In the comments to last week's Invasion episode on ROCR.net, reader TuuronTour asks:

Is this storyline going to be the final end of ROCR? I get the feeling everything is being wrapped up to get our rogue's a well-earned "and they liveth long and happily".

Tuur is almost right: the ending to Invasion doesn't so much wrap everything up as set things up so that I have the largest number of possibilities open. It'll be a while before the world will see a sequel to Invasion, but when I decide, in a year or so, to pick up where I left, I can treat the next story as essentially a new series, with a new cast of characters: Tamlin, Ragnarok, Atra, Jake, Owen, Hildegard, and... one more, with their offspring. It won't be necesary for new readers to learn the backstory - this new lot will be the gang. Older readers will still enjoy the similarities and differences between, say, original Atra and rejuvenated Atra, or be able to see the Tamlin-Ragnarok dynamic in the light of the dynamic that there used to be.

Or... I might scrap that plan altogether, bring Kel and Jodoque back a few years down the line, fast-forwarding to the year 1010. Either way works for me.

Before then, though, I will work on the three remaining stories set in the "old" ROCR universe: Feral, King Groy and Muscle. I am now writing material for Feral and while the first batch of new writing came out as drivel, there are some salvageable elements in it that should get the story moving again. I expect to be taking a few weeks off before I get around to posting any new comics though, and when I do, they will almost certainly be irregular again.

There's also the possibility of a spin-off comic set in the Wodeskog, based on the faerie village and what else might be living there. That's another thing that may or may not happen though.

Next: one more digital drawing. It's an inked version of the penciled character drawing of Aleas I did some six months ago:

Aleas inked digitally

Since my last physical peak in October, I've kept up with running but let other forms of exercise fall by the wayside a bit. I've not been to the gym since back then. As a result, I've lost a bit of muscle strength and gained a bit of belly fat. This is not the end of the world, except that I'm too cheap to buy a set of wider pants.

What has been bothering me, though, is that over the past two weeks, I've had to deal with joint pains that flare up a day or two after training with my running club, which are bad enough to make it hard for me to walk for a day to a day and a half. I don't think these are directly caused by running; rather, they're a seasonal, temperature-related inflammation. I've had to deal with these before though I've previously only had them in my hands. The pains, in different locations each time so far, do flare up after running and sometimes last long enough to make it impossible to go to the next training.

So instead of running last Wednesday, I went to the gym today for a light workout - cycling, elliptical trainer, some easy weight training, nothing that strains the joints. I've also made an appointment for next Tuesday at six o'clock to discuss how to train during a flare-up. I expect I know what the answer is going to be: short, easy and frequent workouts with low impact, maybe 45 minutes every day at a level that doesn't require recovery. But we'll see. To be continued...

I've been doing a lot of stuff to the website lately. Here's what's been changed in the latest tune-up:

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and Chronicles of the Witch Queen now have ads from a new ad provider, Webcomics World. This represents a significant policy change for me as I will be allowing some Flash ads, which will have Behaviours. I will pre-approve those on a case-by-case basis but I will no longer be denying them automatically. We'll see what happens - there's the potential for good earnings there, which will make it easier for me to spend more time and effort on webcomicking again.

To compensate, I've cut the horizontal Google ads on the archive pages on the main site, and will be looking to cull more advertising if this pans out.

The Drunk Duck mirror also gets one of the new ads, because a) it is actually bringing in decent pageview numbers, and b) it looks like I will have to put a lot more work into it in the next month or two, as the infamous FRAMED!!! Great Escape Crossover is due to be repeated there. I will have to write to the other artists involved to try and give all pages a permanent location.

The cast page for Invasion has been updated, as has the main cast page. Individual cast bios on the main site now have comments enabled, so people can write their own notes on the characters. I have also made a start on a cast section for the archives on Modern Tales, and updated the Fan art section there. The interface for uploading fan art was broken the last few times I tried using it last year, but it works now.

I have added some new stuff to Odds and Ends and to the DeviantArt site

This leaves me still having to update the old Comicgenesis site which I essentially forgot about midway through Aggie's tenure as a guest artist. That might be a more complicated job, but as I'm sitting at home with a sore foot, I might as well do it now.

All this work on various mirrors entails a serious reduplication of effort, but that is paying off. Because of the different automated cross-promotion/reader-alerting tools that the various systems have, the combined sites now have about 200,000 pageviews a month, for a comic that has in recent months updated once a month. The reason I'm doing it now is that the Invasion storyline is due to end next Monday, and after that, I want to get back to Feral as soon as I can, though it's likely I'll post a little bit of filler first. If the new ads pay off, I may well soon be updating more frequently again, though it's unlikely that I'll go back to three or more new updates a week.

Earn original art by fixing an HTML problem!

I seem to do nothing on this blog lately but ask readers for help, but that's how it is now. I've switched out some of the Project Wonderful ads for a new ad provider, and ever since, site display has been broken on some pages but not others. In pages like this one, the top ad breaks out of its box in the top right section next to the logo, overlapping the top row of site links and pushing down the rest of the content. The problem only occurs in Firefox 3 (edit) and Internet Explorer, though it is less obviously visible there as the ad just disappears and only on pages using a certain template. Safari and Opera render it correctly; indeed I was working in Safari while changing the templates and didn't notice anything was wrong until 1 AM last night.

What makes this one so annoying is that the HTML code for the top section in those templates is exactly the same as that in the pages that do render correctly, and they pull their positioning code from the same CSS file. Also, I did nothing but switch out one clearly marked block of javascript for another. I spent half an hour counting "Div" tags before passing the problem on to a friendly webdesigner who has more routine and experience fixing problems like this, but told me the next morning she was also stumped. Screenshot

So... if anyone with Firefox 3, a keen eye and a good knowledge of HTML/CSS can help me out with this, I'd be very grateful and send that person an original drawing or page from the archives of their choice..

While I was away, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan was written up in Smashing Magazine's list of 50 outstanding comics from all over the world, along with European greats such as Tintin and Asterix the Gaul and American greats like Calvin and Hobbes.

To be honest, like every list of this kind, it's pretty arbitrary and there are many comics that deserve it more, but I'm honoured and grateful for the acknowledgement and the boost to my readership. Thanks guys!

For some reason, the list was mirrored at I Can Has Happy, which has also been sending many readers my way. It looks like that blog entry has been copied wholesale with only a "via" acknowledgement instead of full credit, but plagiarized or not, it does seem to have a large number of readers so I'd like to welcome people coming in from both blogs to the comic.

In less than five hours, I'll be heading for the United States to spend Christmas and New Years' Eve with Aggie. This vacation will be different from the last three because I'll be taking my parents with me and they'll spend ten days with Aggie and me, Squirrel, Badger, Pyewacket, Dagmar and the many domestic animals that live in her yard. All the signs point to it being the best Christmas ever.

Comics will get posted automatically, and we have internet at Aggie's place - I'm bringing the iBook as well, which she now refers to as my electronic titty. I will scan the latest pages at her place, pass them on to DFG for colouring, and possibly even get them processed and ready to post from there. Stranger things have happened.

I'll probably be in touch - if not, merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of you!

Of course, within a day of me posting the previous message announcing that Invasion would be returning as a weekly comic, the hard drive on my PC gave up. And next week's comic is still with DFG for colouring so I will need to finish it this week. Sod's Law in effect.
Of course, I went to the nearest electronics store to buy a new hard drive as soon as I could, but (Sod's Law in effect) I picked up what must have been the last IDE drive in the store when what I need is a SATA drive. So I'll have to be going there again, only this time I'll do some research first.
Meanwhile, I've been working on the comic for the 21st on the iBook using a Mac version of Photoshop 7. That actually works well despite the iBook being 3 1/2 years old and the files involved being pretty large. I'm impressed by the speed at which Photoshop works and the comfort level with the tablet. Interestingly, I had just been pondering buying a new production laptop, leaning towards a combination of a new MacBook and Photoshop CS 4. I'm within a few hundred Euro of being able to afford it... but it'd still cause me pain in the wallet. Especially Photoshop, whose price level is set at "Whatever we can bleed out of those suckers, it's not like they're going to run to the competition". So it was with interest that I read about some rather poor user experiences Mac users have had with Adobe products in recent years: Adobe CS4: Yet another lousy Adobe installer and Macworld forums: Re: Adobe answers critics over CS3 and CS4 installer woes, both with extensive links and trackbacks to other sites criticizing the user experience on Creative Suite. Installers that fill your drive with crap are a big no-no and in this case the installer problem seems to be symptomatic of other problems with Adobe products on the Mac in particular. I've heard some not very nice things said about Adobe products other than Photoshop in the past year as well.
In any case, I won't be getting Creative Suite, just Photoshop. But if it functions as poorly as that on a Mac, then that's one reason for getting another Mac gone. The linked pages also mention some competition for Photoshop that might be worth checking out, such as Pixelmator. I tried that about a year and a half ago and it didn't immediately floor me, but I didn't exactly try it thoroughly, and in any case it might have evolved quite a bit since then.
Research will be key, though, lest I buy yet another piece of electronic kit that is not what I need.

Update: for more gripes against Adobe including its price gouging, DRM and bloated, overfeatured software, see Dear Adobe.