ShortMinds Webcomic

On labor day Google was forced to announce its new browser and yesterday Chrome was released to the world. One more bloody browser. Heartbreaking news because this means one more browser to test in when developing new sites. But, they do have some interesting idea. Read this comic book to learn all about Google’s new browser.

I haven’t read anything about standards compliance yet and Google is not known for making the most accessible sites. But, every site I’ve tested so far with it has worked like a champ.

Chrome is a head above the rest when it comes to JavaScript performance, something required for all google apps strangely enough.

So far I don’t see any native support for plugins and I can’t live without Firebug. But give it a try if you are interested in this sort of thing.

Today I bring you a warm and fuzzy video. Jonathan Coulton and Felicia Day sing “Still Alive” out at PAX. If you have ever played Portal then you will get it. If not, then it is the song that you hear during the credits after killing GLaDOS.

No comic today, suffered a tragic loss on Friday. The machine i built five years ago, never had any problems with, took a turn for the worse on Friday and now I’m trying to run around and scrounge up the parts to build a new one. Hopefully a new comic to come later or tomorrow.

Cheers!

I found this article on gaming degrees to be of interest. Especially sine I know a couple of folks getting such a degree right now.

I view the game making industry as a bunch of specialists connected together by a mesh with a giant financial spider looming over all of them. So I always wondered if these schools that teach you how to make games ever got down to the level of detail that someone would need to get to in order to be one of those specialists. According to the article they do not, or at least that is the perception by the industry.

P.S. Comic coming later today.

Trip down memory lane today:

I’m not even going to try and explain this video, but if you ever watched Ren & Stimpy then you will get a kick out of it. It’s definitely better than bad, it’s good.

Blizzard delivers again with this awesome video. I can’t wait to hear a release date. I think they might actually release before Christmas this year and I may just have to re-activate my account.

Yesterday I hit the front page of Digg! And then my site went down for 10 hours. What should have been the best day of traffic ever turned out to be the worst in about a week. Which has also lead to, I’m assuming, today’s traffic being just as poor. Six hundred fourteen connections at the same time caused my host to take me down. I didn’t exceed anything else just concurrent connections. Apparently Site5 hosting, not linking them because I am pissed, only allows 50 concurrent connections. After a bit of shopping around yesterday 50 is actually pretty high compared to other shared hosts. Everyone else was around 20 and they all told me the same thing, if you are going to get dugg you are going to need a dedicated server. Decent dedicated servers cost quite a bit and that’s not an expense I can justify right at this time, especially with no proof of sustained traffic yet. I definitely want the site to grow and hopefully in the future I will need a dedicated server once again.

But why was the site down for 10 hours and why is it up now if it is still suffering the Digg effect? I got a nice email from my host in the middle of the night last night that said you are getting a lot of inbound traffic so we are blocking you. After a hectic morning running around town hitting appointments I didn’t see the email until 6 hours after it was sent. I responded immediately to it after thanking the guy that submitted me to Digg and began to wait. Getting to work and periodically checking the site I still had no response 4 hours later. So I fired up live support. The initial lady I got was less than useful with the conversation going something like this: “Hello Nathan”, “I see you have an open ticket, I will let the Tech guys know”, “I guess you have walked away”, “Buh bye.”(Paraphrased) The chat ended as I was formulating a response. Call me crazy but I decided to try again and this time got some guy that looked at my problem and released the block on my site. Thank you again sir! In the meantime while the site was down the once popular story on Digg got burried. I had completely missed out on the traffic of the Digg effect. So while my rather cheap shared hosting survived the Reddit front page and being Stumbled it simply could not survive Digg.

The surge of traffic from reddit and StumbleUpon lately has been primarily due to one comic; Explaining Greatness. Most people have enjoyed it while others have not and I will address some of their issues below. Hitting the front page of Reddit, being stumbled and being dugg have lead to a massive surge of new users. I’m very pleased to look at the numbers and see 95% new visitors and a fairly low bounce rate of 50% in comparison. I’ve also looked through the analytics and what not to find that a decent amount of people clicked through the entire archive and some even clicked through the origins archive.

When I decided to make the Explaining Greatness comic I thought it might get a few hits and then be deemed as old news. Like I’ve said before I did some googeling to try to find something about it out there and couldn’t find anything, but in all honestly I fully expected to be hit with the old news get with the times stick. I did not make the comic to kiss Randall’s ass or ride his coat tail. I made the comic to depict something I found funny and amusing, see how this works now, about another webcomic that happens to be one of the reasons I decided to start my own. I don’t read that many comics any more due to free time and work, but the comics I list over to the right under Other Comics are the handful of comics I make time to read whenever they are updated because they will always be the comics that inspired me to finally start my own.

Cheers to everyone, time to get to work, and send me an email if you too have experienced anything like this or you have your own webcomic or maybe you want to start a podcast, I dunno, anything.

-Nathan

I’ve just enabled feeds via email over at feedburner. Click on the blue rss icon in the upper right of this page or just click here to subscribe. Enter your email and a feedburner window will pop up. Type in the captcha and close the window. You then have to click on a link in a confirmation email.

It just sounds convoluted and weird. Trust me.

It amazes me that even though the US is number one in oil consumption and green house gas emissions, that China can have 16 of the top 20 most polluted cities on the planet. The link is to a 5 part documentary, short 5 minute segments and part 5 is coming soon, about Linfen China, the most polluted city on the planet. Apparently breathing one day in Linfen is equal to smoking 3 packs of cigarettes. Do smokers in Linfen actually have better lungs because at least some of the air they breathe every day is filtered?

This week has been a great week for the site. The comic Explaining Greatness hit the front page of Reddit which led a massive flood of StumbleUpon users, which led to the comic being posted in various spots all over the intertubes. Usage went through the roof, comments went through the roof, RSS subscribers quadrupled and I learned I am a horrible speller.

I’m still interested to know if Randall ever saw the comic or responded, so if anyone knows please drop me a line.

The feedback hasn’t been negative and really hasn’t been positive. I hope I haven’t sinned against the webcomic community by doing a comic about another webcomic. I guess I will find out as the usage drops off to a normal rate after the stumbles slow down.

I’ve never been shy about posting my numbers in the past, but I want to wait and see how this all plays out before I post any numbers, otherwise I’d just be giving you the good half of the numbers. I am interested in the rate of repeat users over the coming weeks. With 96% new users and only 60% bounce, ONLY, I hope some people bookmarked the site and come back.

Cheers to everyone! Drink one for me while I’m at work.

P.S. Does anyone know why it seems that Feedburner takes forever to update a feed?