Hey.
I’ve decided to put the Penguicon report here rather than in Live Journal for a couple of reasons:
1) It was really, really long.
2) I want to see what kinds of ads it generates.
So link on over and have a look. There’s an elapsed-time tour of the construction of the Chaos Machine on pages 4.1 through 4.5, and fun artwork I drew and sold on page 5.
–Howard
One of the sports writers at the local paper lives in my neighborhood and, because this is Utah County we’re talking about, attends the same church I do. He asked if he could interview me for their annual “Progress Edition,” and I agreed.
Last night I posted this to appease community members clamoring for the strip.
This morning I have news.
1) Canaca cut me off without warning because apparently more than 100 of you attempted to read the comic at the same time (and no, Canaca did NOT tell us this might happen).
2) We’ll be executing our 30-day money-back guarantee with Canaca, and moving elsewhere.
3) The site should be operational by early afternoon today.
Re: point number 1 above, it makes SENSE to cut someone off if they’re hogging server cycles. Schlock Mercenary serves static HTML, so that shouldn’t have been a problem. We suspect that some OTHER site on the server was executing php a little too aggressively, and that when the techs went in to take a look they found that MY site was the one with all the users hitting it. After all, within about 10 minutes of the new strip airing, there are typically between 1000 and 2500 readers online requesting it.
So… while it makes sense to cut off a problem site, it’s unlikely we were actually CAUSING a problem. It’s much more likely that the techs at Canaca don’t understand how to configure Apache. (Hey, if any of you Canaca techs are reading this, I just challenged your tech-mojo. BRING it, bay-bee. Your kung-fu is just dung-poo.)
As a result of all this I lose between twelve and eighteen hours of Google Adsense revenue, which, interestingly enough, easily amounts to a couple months’ worth of hosting at canaca.com. Oh, and Canaca loses my business for the next three years, as well as the business of anyone currently reading this.
The hosting company we’re moving to has stated up-front that their policy in this regard is a little different. Rather than holding your site hostage and defecating in the open mouths of your customers, they’ll email your technical contact if there are problems, and give him/her three days to solve those problems. This sounds much more reasonable, don’t you think? They cost a little bit more (about 50% more over a three-year period), but I’ll still be able to pay for three years of hosting in (mumble mumble count-on-fingers) 20 days or so.
So… sorry for the pain, folks. We’ll have it sorted out by the end of the day.
–Howard
Being sick at Penguicon was frustrating. I managed to discharge my critical responsibilities (wrangle chaos, do panels, be “visible”) with flair, but I didn’t get a stitch of drawing done. I brought a week’s worth of scripts in the hope of at least pencilling on them, but I just didn’t have the energy.
I got home and realized that I’d been running on fumes. Monday and Tuesday were almost total write-offs. Lots of naps, lots of lounging around, lots of coughing… very little drawing.
Tuesday morning the colored-and-uploaded buffer stood at 4. I managed to pencil and ink two strips. Today I’m on target to ink the rest of next week, but the colored-and-uploaded buffer is at three — Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have a full week inked, colored, and uploaded. I can feel my strength returning slowly, and I need it all back, because having 9 strips ready to go isn’t nearly enough. I need a month in the can so I can dig in on some other projects without having to worry about what’s airing next at schlockmercenary.com.
–Howard