Waffle

In response to the recent, slight uptick in Project Wonderful advertising I've observed, anecdotally, on my own and other sites, I've added another ad slot on the front page. This is a single, half-banner-format ad between the comic and the blog. As such, it might be good for advertising things that aren't strictly comics, things that appeal to the part of the readership that scrolls on below the comic to see what rants my co-bloggers and I have to offer. If you want to appeal purely to Waffle readers, though, the square ad on the blog itself may be a better match for you.

I've also tried to put up another donation button, going back to basics with the standard Paypal button using the latest revision of their button code. Unfortunately, what should have been a five-minute job of picking a button from Paypal's website and sticking it into my front page template where I wanted it turned into an hour-long brainracker that ended in failure. Wherever I put the button, it displays at double size, and I no longer understand my own stylesheet code well enough to fix that problem. I'll either have to create a button that fits the dimensions my style sheet dictates, or comb through the style sheet to simplify it to the point where I can understand what's going on, removing code that's no longer used and sorting things so that everything is legible again. Both tasks will cut into my drawing time, though, and I'm already very late with Wednesday's comic. I don't even have enough material for Tuesday's filler! So no matter how important and urgent this is in my current, dire financial situation, it'll have to wait.

For testing purposes, here's the button code, as created by Paypal (so with my previous attempts at wrapping it into divs to control the display removed):

It looks all right on the blog but when I put it on the rocr.net home page, it's so big an eyesore that I can't leave it there while I'm not actively working on it. Feel free to click it and donate! But right now, I'm more interested in hearing why it's not displaying as it should, and what I can do about it. My stylesheet code is here.

I'd be remiss in my duties as a Project Wonderful watcher if I didn't mention that since my last post, my Project Wonderful earnings have gone up a bit (though not so much that I can start taking money out of the system, yet), and that I've seen some new advertisters crop up both here and elsewhere. Most notably, I saw an ad for Republican Presidential hopeful Ron Paul on the Clan of the Cats front page. It would be nice to think that the ad was placed there by Congressman Paul's own campaign committee, and in the long run, I can see that happening at least with the lesser-known, lesser-funded campaigns (I had heard of Ron Paul before, mostly in the context of his anti-war stance. But a likely contender he probably ain't). After all, PW isn't all that different from Blogads (now there's a thought - how about a Blogads-style ad format, with text, within the PW system?) as both are inexpensive, turnkey advertising systems. In this particular case, though, it looks more likely that a supporter of Mr. Paul bought the ad on his behalf. Which is a nice enough way to support a candidate.

It would seem that the Project Wonderful sophomore slump is over. I note that for some websites, such as Girl Genius 101, the slum appears never to have happened. Those big-audience webcomics can pull in $ 35 a day minus PW's 25% cut from Project Wonderful advertising. For a webcartoonist, that's pretty good money.

While I'm at it, here's that list of my ad slots again:
Buttons on all my webcomics pages, currently going for $ 0.09 each.
ROCR front-page only square ad, currently going for $ 0.20.
ROCR archive-only leaderboard, currently going for $ 1.80.
Square ad on the blog, currently going for the princely sum of $ 0.04.
Skyscraper ad on Chronicles of the Witch Queen, currently going for $ 0.30.

Readership on the webcomics pages has been going up steadily, so they may well be better locations for your ads than they were just two months ago.

If yesterday qualified as a bad day, today was a Symphony in Suck-Flat. From the ominous, discordant opening bars of "Oh my God, Photoshop Crashes on Startup Without Even Making It Past the Splash Screen" to the drawn-out, repetitive and excruciatingly slow coda of "Let Me Upload, Damn It, Xepher.net!", the dominant themes spoke to me of impending doom, anger, irritation, frustration and Man Battling an Uncaring Environment Especially His Computer. Especially noteworthy were the entirity of the middle Movement, Oh, Bugger It, I'm Not Going to Finish This Before Five and a frenzied section within the penultimate Movement, "One More Little Change Before I Can Save For Web And Upload — Oh, Wait, One More, No, Two More". Both were eminently missable.

Oh, and my headache came back, tea didn't cure it, and my concentration was shot through most of the day as a result of the red-eyed rage and panic caused by Photoshop's weird behaviour. And the fact that the cure for the Photoshop problem was to reset my preferences meant that Photoshop was annoying me in a thousand little ways for the rest of the day.

(If you run Photoshop 7 on XP and it starts crashing on startup, don't waste your time looking for the installation files; what you need to do is start it up again, hold down CTRL-SHIFT-ALT, and answer Yes to the prompt to reset your preferences. The file containing the preferences has been corrupted and you have to start anew. All your actions and swatches are in different files and won't be affected, but you'll have the standard scratch space, brushes, fonts and tool options set, so it will behave differently from what you're used to. Starts up a lot faster now, though.)

What I want to do this weekend is sleep until Monday. What I need to do is finish the colour work on Gang of Four so my editors have it on Monday morning, at least; and also to work on the ROCR pages for Tuesday and Wednesday.
What I'm actually going to do is finish my VAT returns. That shouldn't take all weekend, but the way things are going, it's likely that I'll find a way to stretch the process over two days and/or get myself blocked from the electronic submission process.

It's enough to make a guy move to Tahiti to paint nude women.

Thursday was bad. Of all the things I wanted to get done, I only got as far as post-scan cleanup. In the afternoon, I developed a headache and the bad temper that usually goes with it.
Calvin returned from self-imposed study retreat a day early, having decided that it'd be better for him to take his Friday exam some other time. One reason he's such a powerhouse is that he picks his battles carefully. I asked him to work on the ROCR background, using the procedure I described yesterday. Didn't go well - once his work was scanned, it didn't match up at all well to the character art. In the evening, Jelena and I looked over the originals and found they matched up slightly better, but he definitely did allow the paper to slip on the light table. Also, he was still pretty frazzled from burying himself in his studies. Shouldn't have put him on the spot like that.

Looking back over the past few days, I think I should change the way I work. I don't mean cutting down on the procrastination, though that would definitely be beneficial. I'm now looking at the amount of busy-work in the process. I particularly spend far too much time on cleanup, when it would be much better not to let the materials get dirty in the first place, e.g. by working in non-repro blue pencil, and/or inking on the light table. There are reasons I don't do those things now, but ... they're not very good reasons. They all boil down to "I don't like to work that way" or "I'm afraid to work that way".

For a long time, I had a serious tactile loathing of kneaded erasers. I found them extremely unpleasant to the touch, and refused to work with them for that reason. I've managed to overcome that and now use kneaded erasers a lot, albeit merely as part of an arsenal of erasers for cleaning up my heavy-handed pencils lines. I have some formative bad experiences with non-repro blue, which amount to "this feels all wrong and shitty" but I should be able to overcome these too. As for inking on the light table, that's a bit trickier, because I like to rotate my paper a lot while inking, and, as you can see from the bit about Calvin's backgrounds above, you need to tape down or otherwise fixate your work while working on a light table. Hmmm... Calvin has a set of peg bars that I might be able to use...

The headache subsided in the evening after a cup of Darjeeling Gold Tea. Might be coincidence, might be a sign that I need to watch my fluid intake. I thought I already did that, though.

Today, I hope to get the Gang of Four comic finished, preferably before five. Though I guess it won't make much of a difference whether it arrives at 16:30 today or early on Monday morning. Not practically, anyway. It would be good for my morale if it was done today.

Wednesday was like Tuesday only slightly less so.
Went to bed at midnight-ish on Tuesday, after inking most of the top half of my Gang of Four page. Was good and tired, slept well, but woke up before the alarm. Stayed in bed until after the alarm anyway.
I arrived at work later than usual, close to 11 AM, after doing a bunch of things that I can't even remember right now. Oh yeah, posting a blog post and writing a long forum post somewhere that I then threw away because my argument sucked. I scanned Monday's character-art-only ROCR comic, cleaned it up and sent it to DFG for colouring. The backgrounds will be drawn separately; I don't quite know how we'll handle that, but I'll probably ask Calvin to draw them on a separate sheet of paper, with smaller gutters between the panels so there is some wiggle room for splicing them together. I may ask Mravac to colour the backgrounds so we have one page that the entire team has worked on.
Then, drawing the bottom half of the Gang of Four page, which started slowly but got well underway once I took up my spot in the stairwell outside. I'm getting used to working there, and even the posture aspect is getting better. Let's hope the sunny weather goes on for a little while - I just might get back on track.

I got started on the inking at a little past 4, left at 6, came back to work at nine-ish to do more inking and light table work. Most of it is done now. Tomorrow, I need to finish up the inks, add a few more backgrounds, clean up, scan, letter and colour. I don't think I'll be done at five, but I'm pretty confident I can send the material to the magazine by Friday morning. It'll be my last of the series, possibly my last ever, so I'm trying hard to make it a good one.

Today was the opposite of yesterday: I spent the day feeling sleepy and out of it, but ended up at six with a difficult half of a page mostly tight-penciled. It's likely that I'll get it inked tonight.

I went to bed at 11-ish yesterday, which taking into account the switch to Daylight Savings Time is three hours earlier than my bedtime last Saturday evening. Didn't stop me from feeling sleepy well into the day. Got up at 8, made it to work before 10, didn't properly get started until noon. Luckily for me, part of the work for today involved looking up pictures of objects on Google Images, because I didn't have a folding beach chair on me, and the work crew fixing up the outdoor pool below the studio for the summer haven't started on the pool ladders yet, the bastards. Then I sketched panel actions in my sketchbook, so I knew how much space everything would take. Then I went outside with the Improvised Backing Board to rough-pencil the page itself. At some point while working on that I lost track of time again, because when I came back in to have another look at those pool ladders, it was three PM. Well, better for that to happen while I'm doing actual work, I guess.

After all that ground work, tightening up the pencils and filling in the details was actually easy, and most of that was done in an hour and a half, while still feeling sleepy.

It's now ten minutes to eight in the evening, it's getting dark, and I'm waking up. Slowly, but surely, I'm becoming more alert. I think this goes a little beyond adjusting to Daylight Savings Time, though Jeroen did mention that he and people he knew were affected by that.

(Boring, journal-type post below, but sort of important to my ability to do my job)

At the start of the workday, I was pretty on the ball. I arrived at ten-ish (which is normal - early rising disagrees with me, as does hurrying my breakfast), fixed an already-published comic, finished and set up two more, so that the website is all set until Friday. So far so good, except that by the time I was done, it was noon. I wrote the previous blog entry, which was about my workload, then went on with my next task which was printing out some paperwork (a copy of my Verklaring Arbeidsrelatie for magazine clients that hire me as a freelancer to draw comics) and sticking that in an envelope. Then work on next Monday's ROCR comic, which I really should have finished yesterday. I sat outside in the stairwell of the building at Papiermolenlaan 3 with my penciled art on my knees, on an improvised backing board, so I could catch some rays, popping back inside occasionally to check my email or pour myself a cup of tea. For the first time ever, I took my ink jar outside and inked the page, except for one panel that needs light table work. Done by two - not bad. Mind you, that's just the character art, because I'm still hoping Calvin will be able to find the time to do the backgrounds. Still, I'll go on working like this for as long as the weather remains sunny. There are drawbacks: the posture is bad for the back and bad for control over arm movements, the ink tends to congeal in the ink jar while outside, and it will be a while before I can work as well outside as inside; but on the positive side, there are fewer distractions and I get some fresh air.
Half past two and I've corrected the page. Time for a grocery break. Back at three. Lunch. Half-hearted attempts at developing additional characters and costumes that I'll need in Gang of Four. I get a bit sleepy. Suddenly, Jelena is making moves to call it a day, I look up and it's nearly five o'clock. Since I have some errands to run and am planning to be back after running group training this evening, I leave early.

If you've kept count, after my break, two hours pretty much disappeared, with nothing to show for them but some bad sketches in my sketchbook. What did I do? Some of that time was spent reading The War Nerd, but that doesn't take two hours.

I think the important bit is where I mention I got sleepy. Coffee after lunch might have helped. Or a smaller lunch. That sandwich toaster Jelena brought in just might turn out to be a tool of the devil.

Or it might be the result of daylight savings time, which started the night between Saturday and Sunday. I'd been looking forward to the switch (running practice in daylight! Yay!) but when it happened, it took my by surprise. I'd been up late on Saturday, working. On Sunday, I was in a bad mood for most of the day, all the way into the evening, when I practiced with my band for the first time in many months. I enjoyed it, despite the marked decline in my already limited playing chops, but I was more than a bit moody and not entirely with it. And I definitely didn't get enough sleep last night - effectively having to get up an hour early.

If it's DST, the problem should go away soon enough. But if it's something else, I need to hunt it down and kill it. Expect a few more boring, journal-type posts over the next few days while I sort it out.

In the blog under his comic, Matthew Skala has been thinking about the same concerns I have with Project Wonderful, and thought them to their logical conclusion:

In Project Wonderful news, I started scaling back my bids because my account with them was running low, and I've already sunk what feels like more than enough money into it. I decided to shoot for breaking even - spending no more money buying ads on other people's sites than my own ad boxes bring in. So I've been looking at my bids, figuring out which are most expensive per click, and lowering those until they're no longer winners - the idea being to reduce my total expenses while keeping the bids that produce the best performance of clicks per unit money. Thing is, though, pretty often when I lower a bid to the point where it starts losing the auction, it only loses the auction for a short time. Other people are lowering their bids too. I wonder if I've started some kind of a thing. Unfortunately, it's happening on my own boxes, too. The vertical box went from 0.10 and 0.20 bids, to 0.02, in the last couple of days. Of course that reduces my budget and means (if I'm going to be serious about the break-even thing) that I have to lower my own bids even more.

I wonder if this is going to stabilize in some kind of steady state, or if it's a basic problem with the market. Money leaves the system for Ryan's 25% cut, and presumably some of the big-time ad venues (the ones that get bids of dollars per slot per day) are taking out profits as well. I'm not taking out profits. If too many of the small-timers like me decide they want to break even, there's going to be very little actual money entering the system, and the stable state is going to be basically a free banner-swap network. For it to work as designed, there need to be more buyers bidding more real money, and I don't know where they're going to come from.

I'd add that that projected steady state would be a free banner-swap network that is much smaller than PW's current network because people would start taking down their PW ads and returning to the warm, heaving bosom of Google Adsense and other large advertising networks. If I was Ryan North, I'd worry about this a bit.

I'm definitely experiencing the same phenomenon that Matt is talking about, partly because I'm one of the people he's inflicting it on, the cheap, cheap bastard. It's extra painful for me because I spent rather a lot of money on Project Wonderful in the final months of 2006, and once I take that into account, it's very unlikely I'll break even over the full period I've been buying and selling ads through it. I'm running in budget-neutral mode now and I'll be able to claim the late-2006 advertising binge on my taxes, but with hindsight, I'd have done better to keep it in my pocket.

Note that this is the third time I've linked to Matt since he started putting his ads on my site. I'm normally against doing that. It's a conflict of interest even though the amounts of money involved are infinitesimal. But every time I click on Matt's ad I find, if not necessarily a great episode of The Bonobo Conspiracy, then at least a well-written and/or thought-provoking article about one of his many geeky interests. Besides, there's actually a perverse incentive for him to take down his ad, because the permalinks to this blog are free and are arguably a lot more effective than the tiny button ads he's currently paying a penny for (the cheap, cheap bastard).

Another effect that may be coming into play with Project Wonderful if not enough new buyers enter the network is bid monopolies. I think one of my ads may be in a bid monopoly situation: One bidder is willing to lock in a bid over and above the likely real value of the ad for a long period, so that people willing to bid the real value and not a lot more end up giving up, leaving the overbidder to snap up the ad spot for pennies.

I hope Matt is wrong about the direction PW is heading in, and I hope someone will prove me wrong about that other thing as well. But right now, I'm a bit bearish about it, as they say.

Oddly, the one place where my PW ads still do well is this blog, which you wouldn't think of as an ideal place to put (mostly) webcomics-related ads.

... 365 updates this year, folks. No matter what.

Ground rules: the 365 updates won't all be Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan updates - obviously the material posted since mid-December hasn't been. It won't all be new either. White House in Orbit was all done and published on another website years ago. However, I will only post material that hasn't been posted on ROCR.net or the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site before, and all the updates will at the very least be re-scanned. All updates made from old material will have a significant amount of work done to them compared to the versions as originally published, varying from simple clean-up and correction to recolouring and wholesale dialogue rescripting. I'm looking to create definitive versions, which will be ready to go to print if any of them turns out to be popular enough to sell in print form.

365. One a day. Overall, I expect to post more completely new material in 2007 than in 2006, even if the bulk of that won't show up until the second half of the year.

I just scanned in 10 installments of Feral, by the way.

I've just added Snap preview code to Rocr.net's templates, or at least some of them. Snap offers previews of links on web pages. If you find this irritating or it doesn't work properly on your browser, let me know; I think it'll be a nice addition to the site but if enough people complain, I'll take it off again.