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That's just from the moment I tear off a Bristol sheet till the moment it is posted in the update queue. Yes, it surprised me too; before my long break, pages took 8 to 10 hours, max. I've never been fast, but now I've got slower. Writing, including the many rewrites, is not included.

Wanna time yourself while working on a ROCR guest comic? I'm still looking for a few good guests...

's all right. I chose to, because at 13 hours a page, I'd ruin myself if I continued. Better to have some time off to steadily work on new pages.

I can refuse porn ads*) on a case-by-case basis from within their system**). Shouldn't be a problem.

*) Or any other ads I don't like.
**) Or I should say, I will be able to do so, once I get an invite to set up ad space on my site. I have no idea how long that will take.

I'm interested in running ads served by Project Wonderful, a potentially nifty ad service run by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics and Oh No Robot. It seems to be doing well, though so far I've only seen ads for other webcomics served through the network. Its approach appears to be the polar opposite to Speechbubble's, working in a way that favours smaller advertisers.
Could PW be added to the provisional approved ad networks list?

BTW the Talk About Comics Blog is devoting quite a bit of space lately to new players in the online advertising industry, and it looks more and more like the practices that made the last generation of online advertisers so distasteful are going the way of the dinosaur. Except that no kids will ever think popup ads are awesome death machines.

Reinder, I've been really enjoying your comic! I like the drawing style! Its so awesome! Seems a bit familiar, what were your inspirations for you art style?

Oh, God, where to start? Asterix was  a big influence, as was Cerebus. Add in bits of Heinlein (who I loathe now, but enjoyed between the ages of 10 and 30),  Pratchett, Monty Python, Miyazaki, Daniel Ostvold and many of my local peers who were putting out black and white fanzines at the same time I was.

EDIT: and Holy crap!?! have you been online with that webcomic since 1991???

No, I simply started writing and drawing the comic in 1991, as a callow youth of 19. I didn't start getting it online until, oh, late in 1994.

Thanks!

Well there's talk in the Comicgenesis message boards of setting up competing Grinds.  That sounds like a good idea to me.

The artist and cast of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan are proud to be part of the Lazy Grind Mk. 2, a competition to maintain a three-times-weekly update schedule for as long as possible. Xepher.net gets a namecheck in the sidebar, by the way.

Three updates a week may seem like a step back from the five I've been posting weekly since May, 2005, but from Monday and into the indefinite future, I'll be posting all-new, work-intensive ROCR comics, and trust me, three a week will be difficult enough.

I hope you'll enjoy following along and do drop by at the contest's hub site, Daily Grind Mk. 2 to check out the other comics and trash-talk on my and xepher.net's behalf in the tag board!

ER, OK, but not now. Not yet awake and I need to get away from the computer for a few days. After the weekend.

That client is an ADSL connection from planet.nl so is probably me.

Thanks again. I'm sorry these problems keep cropping up with my site. Because WillowCMS works so well most of the time, I tend to forget that it's still somewhat experimental and occasionally a nasty gremlin shows up. Mithandir, who wrote the CMS, is aware of the problem now, by the way. Don't know when he'll find it; in the mean time I'll avoid doing what I did that triggered the bug.

There seems to be something badly wrong with the MySQL server today. I get error messages like this one:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) in /home/rocr/public_html/willow-db.php on line 2
Could not connect

and similar ones occur all over Xepher.net's home page as well.

It's possible that this crash was cause, at least directly, by me reading full site usage logs in WillowCMS, in which case I apologise. On the other hand, I've done that before and while it's pretty hard on the server, it hasn't caused it to keel over before. So there may be other factors involved.

Conditional approval is reasonable enough. Thanks!

Speech Bubble Media is a new advertising network for webcomics. Thewebcomiclist.com's Webmonkey Ash is involved in it, and I heard about it via TWCL. I signed up with them to find out more, and I've been impressed with the speed at which my application was approved. I also like the sound of what they're saying in their first newsletter:

We’re now talking to advertisers about targeted exposure on webcomics. We have existing relationships with companies such as Apple, Sony, adidas, Warner Bros and Microsoft all of whom have recently bought digital advertising on animation sites.

We'd like to stress that we believe in the high value of your audience and we’re not looking to undersell your inventory.

We will be securing premium advertising from companies keen to target webcomic readers at CPM rates approaching $1+ net to Publishers.

That means Speechbubble won't be supplying ads for 'smileys' or seeking low cost bulk deals, but neither do we ask that you stop dealing with existing suppliers if you want to monetize every page impression in the short term.

If they can make this happen, then they'll be putting classy, if somewhat corporate, advertising that pays well (I'd only have to multiply my pageviews tenfold to make a living) targeted to webcomics on my site.

They haven't started publishing ads yet, but because of the above, I'd like to ask Xepher permission to run their ads on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan.

Have any of you got any experience with using Bad Behaviour on your websites? It's a system, primarily developed as a Wordpress plugin but also adaptable to other content management systems, that examines Http requests to see if they're malicious, and from the software's own blog, it appears to be very effective.

Currently, very little spam makes it past my filters, but about 20% of all hits to the content management system that runs Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan are in some way malicious - attempted comment spam, referral spam, various script kiddie tricks. I'd like to conserve the wasted bandwidth and computer cycles, and keep those requests out of my statistics. Also, the vast majority of all searches on my blog are from blog spammers inserting their links into any web form they can find. It's a big problem that could risk bringing down my website again.

If you run Wordpress, you may need this or already have it; but I'm most interested in hearing from people who got it to work with software other than Wordpress, which it may not do out of the box.
I'm no PHP programmer, but I've got access to a good one.

Seems to be good, although I had a bit of a worry about the page loading speed on ROCR.net earlier on. I'm also somewhat concerned that the hackers may be back to cover their tracks and do more damage that way. I'll keep my eyes open.

I'm going to need to read up on Berkely DB's export format for moving the gallery contents around...

Well the spam bounces basically happen all the time. I deleted the inbox and will set up filters when I have some time.