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I've got a guest comic on Jelena Saiso's Weekly this week. Jelena and I are on the same wavelength about a lot of things, so writing this one was a breeze. I did cheat a little with the drawings, though - that Vortex was the easiest background I've made in a looooong time.

Hmmmm... How about Freewebshop? I've noticed that Dresden Kodak uses that in a way that's similar to what I have in mind, though from the software's website it appears to be too membership-oriented for my purposes. I want any schmuck coming in from the streets to be able to drop me $ 75 for an original, not just signed-up members

I've been thinking of selling more original art through my website - there seems to be a bit of interest. I want to automate things a little more than I have, and do that within my own website, because of the two art selling services that I know about, one (Webcomicsnation Swapmeet) sucks, and the other (Comicspace Market) is a subscription-only service and the idea of paying just to test it puts me off a bit.

So I've been looking at OS Commerce. Does anyone on Xepher have any experience working with that? Is it easy to integrate with CMSes?

Two clicks instead of three is worth it regardless of the shiny. Make sure that the most important things are 1 click or zero clicks (i.e. on the front page, especially if you have a webcomic), though.

DHTML/CSS has become really good in the past few years, usability-wise. Of course, AJAX has brought us many infuriatingly unusable designs. I don't agree that websites these days are all about the looks - functionality is more important than shininess if you want people not to hate you. But it HAS become easier to accomplish both.

Still thinking about it. I need to get off my butt and bill them for the last two comics I did for them (being a big publishing company, there's no danger that they'll default or anything  - they're canceling one publication, not liquidating the company. However, as the editorial team will be dissolved by May 1, there may be confusion about the paperwork, which I'd like to avoid) and that will keep me going until July. So I have a bit of time to think about it and explore my options. I am leaving open the option of getting a real job, even if it's part-time work like delivering mail. That one's always a classic part time job for artists, because it gets you outside and allows you plenty of time to work on art. The market isn't too good for that sort of work right now, though. I may also step up efforts to get more teaching gigs. These  can get very lucrative.

Meanwhile, as always, the best way for people to help me keep my morale up is to spread the word about ROCR! I've done well lately in terms of readership, which now regularly reaches 1300+ uniques. And having more readers also increases my chance at getting decent advertising revenue. I'll do some fundraising in early May, probably, as well.

.... aaand I just heard today that my main client, the one that's been the backbone of my attempt at making a living with cartooning, is ceasing publication. Drat.

That said, I personally find gallery to be needlessly complicated code for what should be a rather simple task. I haven't used the 2.x series much, but about 40% of the bot/hack attacks I've had to deal with were from bugs in users various gallery (1.x) installs... another 50% were bugs in phpBB installs. I'm not saying don't use it if it's what you want. Just keep it up to date when they release bug fixes, and maybe take a look to see if there's some lighter weight code somewhere that still does what you need. I personally wrote my own simple gallery/thumbnail maker. It's one file, and does really nothing but accept uploads, let you title/date them, and automatically make a thumbnail. http://xepher.xepher.net/images/ Code is http://xepher.xepher.net/images/code.phps It's 4kb, and requires nothing outside of PHP itself. Gallery is 9.5 MB! and also requires external programs to process images. To me, that just means a lot of room for bugs and potential exploits, mostly in features and such that I'd never even use. I'm betting someone out there has written something that'll do what you need without being as much overkill as gallery is. Totally your choice though.

I see your point, especially because my Gallery 1 install hasn't been a picnic for me to maintain either. I'm holding out hope that the 2.x series is less buggy and offers better separation of templates and code functionality (that aspect of series 1 was terrible, even though it's both an obvious idea and easy to implement - when I asked for templates to be separated in atp autosite, the guy who made it redesigned and built it that way in a matter of hours). If it isn't, I'll be very cross.

I've thought of deleting the Gallery installation outright, but I can't make myself. There's something of value in having an image gallery on my site - something that isn't the webcomic or the blog - and I'm convinced that there's value in having it set up properly, with comments, an RSS feed and all the navigation and sorting you need when the image collection grows big. Your images script is a neat enough tool but looks a little too quick-and-dirty for what I want.
Gallery, on the other hand, is big and bloated, just as you say. Something inbetween should be good for me if I can find it - especially if I can import my existing Gallery data in there. Any tips, anyone?

Will the new server have PHP safe mode on? For that matter, does the current one still have it? I've been thinking of installing Gallery 2.0 to revive my creaky, broken old gallery section, and it says in the requirements that it needs to have Safe Mode off.
We've dealt with this before, on my latest upgrade, but that was aaaaages ago

Blogs aren't really a trend anymore. Or at least, they're not the latest thing, not by a long shot. I do think the number of blogs will continue to grow.

I use mine to vent, point, ponder and occasionally to replace my long-term memory, which is all filled up with rock family trees and can't really take on any new data anymore.

Well, taken as a whole, XN isn't down all that much. It's unnerving when it happens but I could deal with that by being less neurotic.

I read the message at about 17:00 CET, but it came in on an old email address that I rarely check (and will indeed be canceled in a few months), so it may even have referred to yesterday's outage. What it said was that "ROCR had no IP address" (quoting from memory because I only read that address on the studio machine anyway, and am now at home). Two outages that I was personally witness to happened in the afternoon (CET) on Friday and Saturday. The Friday one was long enough for Project Wonderful to send me email that my ads were suspended until they could confirm that the site was up again.

Fes, if what I wrote (quoting the very smart Matt Skala at length) in my weblog today is correct, then that policy is counterproductive. The network needs new money to function at all, and that new money is more likely to come from people who primarily are there to sell stuff.
Not that it matters much, at the scale at which you and I operate, but it's the principle that counts. I say that a lot, which is probably why I'm having trouble making rent.

The situation with my own PW ads is brutal right now. Oddly, the only one that's doing at all well is the one on the blog, which I would think would be a much better match for Google ads, considering that it's a text-based publication that gets most of its readership from searches. Anyway, anyone still interested in bidding after reading that blog post can snap up some of my ads for pennies.

Seems to have been down again. I got a message from a reader about it.

What I want to know is "why doesn't the cheap bastard bid on my ad boxes?" Especially because I've totally advertised on his.

So far, I've never denied anything for offensive content. I have, however, denied and banned some ads for websites that looked scammy to me.

I'm only concerned with referrer spam going to Willow, because that distorts my business information. One interesting tidbit: Mithandir, who uses Willow on his own comic, Chasing the Sunset, gets next to no referrer spam at all (he gets more, and smarter, comment spam though).

Some referrer spammers are targeting one page, which is prominently linked outside of ROCR.net. Others are picking random pages. Doesn't seem to be much of a pattern to it, to be honest.

I'll work on it when I have a little more time, and see what I can do.