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Using non-english character set encodings for web pages can be slightly complicated. If it's just plain HTML, then two main things. First, you need to use a UTF-8 capable text editor when modifying the document, and make sure to upload the file in binary mode if using FTP. Secondly, you need to set the character set to UTF-8 in the HTML code. This can be done with

Code Select Expand

<meta charset='utf-8'> in most cases. If you're using something more complicated (like a PHP based CMS or some such) then you'll need to find the documentation for that CMS to see what needs to be modified to support UTF-8. See this page for an example/test I just put up. http://xepher.xepher.net/utf8.html That appears to show the proper caret (hat) above the s. If it looks right to you as well, then you should be able to simply use the same meta tag in your own documents.

Yeah, Sisters is just down the road. Funny you mention wildfires, as the last time I went through there, the entire town of Sisters was smokey, the sky was burnt orange at noon, and it was literally raining ash from a nearby wildfire. Combined with the drive right past the extinct volcano, I thought I'd taken a wrong turn an ended up in Mordor. :-P Drop me an email when you get to planning your trip details and we can work something out.

Apparently I borked the avatars/attachments on the forum. I reuploaded them from backups, but some users still have broken avatars, so I apologize. If you are one of the ones still affected, you'll need to reupload your avatar image.

So, I quit my job on friday, and my lease here in Houston is up on the 18th. After that, I'm packing everything I own in a trailer and driving northwest. My goal is Bend, Oregon. I have no job, no place to live, and know absolutely no one for hundreds of miles in any direction. My only plan is to "chill the buck out" for several months and try to find something more interesting to do with my life than sit behind a desk.

How will this affect the site? Well, it shouldn't. I've plenty of money saved up, and the server bills are on auto-pay. Theoretically, I shouldn't need another job for two to three years. Only possible impact is if something technically mucks up while I'm in transit, I might not catch it for a bit longer. I will have a laptop with me and random wifi along the way though.

That said, I don't plan to work for at least another six months, maybe longer. I'm going to travel, relax, and enjoy things. To that end, if anyone is situated between here (Houston) and Oregon, and would like to have a pint of beer or a cup of coffee, let me know. This road trip may be solo, but it should still be epic, and I'd love to meet any of ya'll I can along the way. :-P

Just log into user-services and you can change your password as well as set other basic account info. https://xepher.net/user-services/

Note: The SSL cert is self-signed, so your browser is going to give you warnings about that, but it's safe to proceed anyway.

I've upgraded both the forum and webmail software to new versions. The webmail one went smoothly, but I hit some bumps with the forums. I think I got it sorted out, but if you run into problems, please let me know.

Comic looks pretty good, if you can get your web design stuff sorted out, I don't think I'll have a problem accepting it for hosting.

To that end, you may want to check out some of the pre-made solutions like comicpress (a wordpress extension.) They (once installed) let you upload and manage a comic site without actually needing to code HTML or anything.

I unfortunately don't have the time to spare, but you might be better served by posting at least some of the comic in question to help attract potential collaborators.

Sorry I'm so slow in responding. Please send me an email (admin@...) with your request, and I'll work on changing your username (and thus, subdomain.)

Alright, you're in! You should have an email with login credentials and instructions. Please read/follow them, and let me know if you have any questions. Welcome Aboard!

So you live and work on a co-op? Next challenge question is this. Sell me (or anyone) on the idea! That is to say, why's it worth doing, what made you choose that lifestyle, etc.

A few questions to start off with.

How long have you been regularly drawing (and how long for comics in particular?)

Do you have any galleries anywhere like deviantart, tumblr, or any other art site?

What's the longest running project you've worked on?

I think Kompozer is a spin-off/standalone version of the old Mozilla integrated HTML editor. I used to use that many years ago, but haven't really seen/used it (or other WYSIWYG editors) in a while now, so I can't speak directly to it's usefulness. Looking at what it offers though, it's probably a good place to start, and as it's free, there's not really a downside to trying it out for a while. One thing to note is that most modern sites on the web don't usually use static HTML anymore, and tend to run CMS systems or the like. That is to say, things like wordpress, joomla, etc. I know quite a few users here specifically use wordpress with the comicpress plugin. http://comicpress.org/ Using something like that basically lets you have all the nifty features like archives/calendars, rants/blog posts, forward/back and other navigation, etc. pretty much out of the box. The tradeoff is that it can be somewhat difficult to customize if you don't like the normal layout options (though basic customization like colors, your own art for headers and buttons and such is pretty easy.) That said though, it works pretty well for most comics, and is MUCH faster to get setup and running than learning HTML and doing things the hard/manual way. There are other comic-specific systems out there too (comikaze, comiccms, walrus, comicgallery, etc.), though I'm not really sure how they rate compared to comic press as I've never used them much directly.

Okay, I've finally done it. If you log into user services now, there should be an option to use external email, and a text box where you can enter the list of mail servers to use. Don't enter priorities, just the five google mailservers in order. In other words, put exactly the following into the text box.

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM


As this is new, it's not completely tested of course, so please let me know if you have any problems or see any errors.

Over the past two days, /var filled up, preventing new email messages from being accepted by the server here. I've corrected the problem, and as messages queued on other servers are retried, they should start trickling in here shortly. If you normally have a decent volume of mail to your account here, some of it may come in big chunks now that things are back online. I apologize for the interruption in service, as I should have caught that earlier but I've been busy with the holidays.

As to the root cause, it was the apache error log filling up very quickly with deprecated and strict code warnings. Even though these are disabled in the default config, several users appear to have code the explicitly turns some of this extra logging back on, and thus fills up the log faster than usual. If you have a site here, now would be a good time to see if it's generating errors and update any third-party scripts you have installed to ones compatible with php 5.4. Not a big deal at this point though, I'm just going to rotate the error log more frequently.