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So, I figured out the problem with the Like Button, then gave it a couple days to fix itself; it didn’t.
I’m still not sure exactly what happened, or how, or when; but something on facebook.com’s end has gone all stupid. So, now, as soon as anyone Likes something, the system seems to record that, dragging along everyone who ever Liked anything else. More or less.
Today’s strip jumped instantly to twenty-one Likes.
I’m not sure that’s something I can really fix. At least, it might not be something I can repair. At best, I could probably just kill the system, losing what used to be useful data; I don’t exactly wanna do that.
I suppose it’s harmless enough, technically. It’s just stopped being a transparent method for measuring popularity. There are other, serverside ways to track this stuff, like unique hits to specific strips over time; that’s better than tracking through adverts and things, since the majority of people have those blocked and that doesn’t track offsite views and repins and all.
Essentially, everything’s okay apart from the little popularity contest. Mostly. Although another mess facebook.com have made involves the thumbnails on linked entries: whatever they’re doing, links to a specific strip magically default to the thumbnail for my mountainboard which isn’t even visible in a given entry.
Technically, I could also rewrite the site to fix FB’s bug. But I’m not really in a hurry to do that. I suppose it would work; it would just be a little like buying a private island to evade taxes: the effort put into solving the problem would ultimately be a matter of principle, not of efficiency.
So, I dunno. I guess the first thing I’ll do is nothing at all. For a while. If this is happening everywhere, FB might fix the problem on their end. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll just stop counting on their system to tell me anything useful.
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I may have to kinda rethink something here.
Pretty much ever since I added a Like Button to this site, I’ve been trying to measure relative favouritism by the number of siteside Likes a given strip ends up getting. Eventually. Which is flawed in its own design, since people can sneak in and Like something months after it went live. Not that people on average ever do.
My standard for likiness to date has been that, if a given strip gets ten Likes, it’s more popular than most of the others. So far, that’s not the worst system. I think. Except that the strip which just went Live a few hours ago, at midnight [1099], wound up getting thirteen likes before its eInk was dry.
Maybe that’s because it was actually better than average. Or, maybe, it was because the site’s getting more popular [posting the daily strips to pinterest.com for the last couple weeks has had an unexpectedly positive effect], attracting likier people—the sort who hit any Like Button they see, wherever they are.
Which is okay. It just might suggest that my standard is becoming more flawed.
The other problem is that people come in and Like things months after no one’s looked at them lately. Which is also okay. But I’ve been a bit slackish about going through nearly six hundred strips, watching for LikeCounts in the double digits. Believe it or not, I haven’t got any better way of doing that than anyone; I literally have to click Next beneath each strip to move on and see what the counter says.
That’s not the funnest waste of time I can think of. Partly because my rendermonster died, and I haven’t really done much of anything to fix it yet. I’ve been doing the webcomic on a relatively stupid Gateway NetBook lately; it’s relatively stupid in that I had less hassle animating fullmotion cartoons on a CommodoreSX64 in the eighties.
The 1983 Commodore SX64 NetBook.
Weight: 23lbs
Processor: 1MHz
RAM: 64K [duh]
Baudrate: 300bps
Screenmode: 320*200*4bit; 5″ diagonal 4:3
Price: US$995 [US$2,264.27 adjusted via CPI to 2012; approximately 1,000 packs of Dunhill Cigarettes or 1,200 gallons of Premium Unleaded Fuel in actual purchasing power]
Ability to Beat a 2011 Gateway LT2808u NetBook in a Fight: Affirmative
So, that’s part of my problem here.
Then, in the third place, while there may be those hitting Like whenever and wherever they see the option, there are also those, in the majority, who hit Like wherever they first see the option. So, while a given strip here on the site might have two or three Likes, the same strip could have twenty on its link from facebook.com, or a dozen repins at pinterest.com, or whatever.
The whole system’s a mess.
So, I’m not sure what I’m gonna do about it. Maybe do what smart people do: repurpose the Favourites Tab to display my favourites. Maybe just lose that tab entirely, letting people like what they like without peer pressure. I dunno. Maybe just go through watching for double digits after all.
I’ll think about it. I’ve usually got time while I’m waiting for this stupid netbook to remember that I told it to do something thirty seconds ago.
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{EAV_BLOG_VER:9856168047059164}
If you’re wondering what that codelooking thing is: it’s a code.
I’ve been playing with EmpireAvenue.com this week. And that’s actually kinda fun. Also, there’s an advantage to connecting RSS Feeds to my profile there. And, the way to do that is to throw the code, above, into a post; then the EAv system will look for it and ascertain that I wasn’t joking about owning this site.
So, that’s what that’s about.
I’m gonna go back to buying and selling now….
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So, I’ve been trying to look into a couple things, just to ascertain whether I can logistically release a KindleBook annually with all the strips for the year, and whatever extra content. And, so far, the answer is kinda No One Knows.
Part of the problem, which I’ve mentioned before, is that the first year wasn’t a year: it was 121 days—and not exactly all in a row. Since that’s really weak, I’d want to include what I’d call Year Zero in with the strips from all 365 days in 2011, resulting in 486 strips. Then things get weird.
First: Regardless what I might do on my end, no image can be more than 127K. Probably, that’s okay; though, in PNG, a few of the strips have gone over that. In theory, when I compile the KindleBook, those’ll automatically be compressed to 127K or less, as jpegs. Whether they’re compressed at all well is another question.
So, what I could do would be to compress things to jpeg on my end, and wind up with whatever I get.
Second: 127K x 486 is nearly sixty-two megs. And the upper limit on a KindleBook is fifty megs. Fortunately, not all of the strips are currently at or above 127K, so that might not be the worst news. Assuming that the total—with images and text and coding and whatever—is under fifty megs, then we can do this.
Third: Once the whole thing is under fifty megs, the pricing structure gets weird. For example:
For a US Dollar sale, if your Digital Book has a file size of 0.400 megabytes and a List Price of $8.99, and we sell your Digital Book at the List Price, the Delivery Cost for a sale in US Dollars will be $0.06 (0.400 MB x $0.15 = $0.06), and your Royalty will be $6.25 (($8.99 – $0.06) x 70% = $6.25).
I’m not even sure what that means. I mean: I get it; the filesize adds delivery expenses [similar to the printing costs we used to have], so the streetlevel price being $X.99, that works out to $X.99-30%, -$N for the delivery costs. I guess the idea’s that, if a KindleBook is exactly fifty megs, then that’s $18.75 just due to the filesize; then, since that’s more than $2.99, amazon.com only want thirty percent as their cut; if I wanted seventy cents per copy, as an example, your cost would already be $19.75. I think. If I’ve got this right.
The simple test is to get to the end of the year, compile the whole thing, upload it, and see what the system says. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something; maybe it’s even worse than I’m deducing. The best I could do for now, I suppose, would be to compile what I’ve got, maybe with some lorem ipsum filler, and see what a mere 389 strips come out as. Possibly not the worst idea, since that’d be close to the KindleBook for Year Two, if this all works out.
On the other hand, if I just go oldschool with this, 486 strips with maybe a hundred pages of actual text would fall within a standard printing length. It would still cost a bit, but people are more inclined to spend twenty or thirty bucks on a book if it’s actually made of molecules. So I’m not ruling that out either.
I dunno. I suppose, in the worst case, I’ll get everything compiled and ready to go, and it just won’t work. Or, if it does, then no one’ll care. But, apart from spending a couple days on the coding and supplemental writing, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt me much to find out. More on that later, I guess….
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Nothing major. Well, kinda. Small enough that I actually forgot to mention it here, when I found out.
One of the newspapers showing interest in Stick Primo has at least delayed its interest for a few months. It’s the one I was talking about a week ago, last time I wrote one of these. The one I figured was in the process of putting together a contract.
Initially, that wasn’t the case because it was the Friday before LabourDay, so the sort of people who throw contracts together had bugged out to start the weekend. Then the weekend happened, including Monday; then it was Tuesday.
Then I learned that, in fact, the paper in question was looking at two new strips to pick up. It was the other one with which they ran.
So: whatchagonnado, I guess. Last I heard, things are still somewhere on the table; we might get this to happen toward the end of the year, when an unrelated contract expires.
Meanwhile, there are other papers; and, obviously, there’s StickPrimo.com. So, in the larger scheme, it’s nothing major.
About the site: things are still picking up here. Yesterdayish, the serverstats reported that this thing had reached 150,000 daily hits [in fact, it was closer to 160,000; but that's somehow less interesting a number], so that’s kinda pleasing. Of course, that includes RSS feeds, so I’m not sure whether 150,000 people are gonna hit the actual site to see this. But, in terms of people at minimum looking at whatever given day’s strip, the bar just got raised.
There’s also this other thing, which I’m not personally all that clear on. The impressions at facebook.com, from the fanpage thing. Reportedly, the number of times a given strip [identified as a 'story'] has been seen on the fanpage itself, and in the newsfeeds of the fanbase:
So far as I know, that wouldn’t affect the serverstats. Though whatever percentage of people seeing a little thumbnail at facebook.com might then click on it to come here and be able to see what they were looking at. So it might be an irrelevant number; I don’t really know.
What I suppose I do know—or at least suppose—is that thirty-odd thousand impressions per strip sounds a little relevant somehow. Maybe it’s not. But it looks pretty cool. So I’m gonna go ahead and regard it as a good thing…whatever it actually is.
Oh. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing. But it’s a thing. In fact, it’s what reminded me to come back and write one of these today. Today’s strip, being a singlepanelled thing, has the hovertext mentioning that there might not be any more singlepanelled strips. Because the format the newspaper in question had wanted was a simple 4×1 thing: [][][][]. Now that having the strips show up in a newspaper, in any format, is delayed at best, that’s no longer really the case; there’ll be a couple of singlepanelled strips coming out next week, and thereafter pretty much whenever a single 1×1, 8:9 panel makes the most sense.
At least until or unless that or whatever paper picks the thing up after all, constraining the aspect ratio.
But that’s not a problem, for now.