StickPrimo

This is funny. For as long as I’ve been doing this now—meaning a couple of months, in which time I could write, on average, one to four novels—I’ve actually just finished the first full calendar month of strips. There are a couple of blacked out dates in September, from before I even registered the domain, making October the first month to have nothing missing.

Not yet, of course, from your end; while I’m writing this, the last four days of the month are still unclickable. But their strips are all lurking in the backend, waiting to be released every twenty-four hours. So that’s kinda something to behold. Maybe.

Meanwhile, October ends on Sunday. Which to my thinking is the beginning of next week. But, discounting the weekends, next week sorta starts on November the First. And I haven’t done anything for that yet. I could, but I’m kinda pondering whether to pull another themeweek sorta thing. The last time I did that, I kinda regretted it. But what do I know: you guys seemed to like it well enough.

Probably, I won’t end up doing it. Yet. Because, what I’m thinking toward would be something of an annual event, like SharkWeek or something; and, next year, November the First is a Tuesday, rendering the whole idea broken. So, if the idea’s to do something annually in the First Full Week of Variabruary, then there’s no rush to start it up this time in November; in fact, it might be more logical to pull it in the First Full Week of January. It’s something to think about.

In other news….

So, I’ve been playing with advertising a bit. Funny. I’ve been, like, professionally webmastering for what’s about to be fourteen years; this is the first time I’ve come close to paying to advertise a site. For most people, it’s just a given: start up a website; pay people to link back to it. I got this far without that. In fact, technically, I haven’t spent any money yet, since I’m just folding profits from adverts showing up on this site back into the system to advertise this site elsewhere—it’s all roughly zerosum, since I’m still getting a bit more per day from this site than I’m sending off to other sites to advertise it.

Anyway. What I’m noticing in the backend, even granting that, like, Every Click Counts, is that about eighty percent of incoming traffic is still coming from facebook.com, where I’m not actually paying them to advertise it. And, even if I were, I could force a limit of one cent per click; as it is, I’m averaging three cents per click. Which isn’t terrible; it’s just not all that necessary.

In theory, if I put a lot of money—conceivably hundreds per day—into advertising on seriously popular sites, I could get the Cost per Click back down to a penny or less. But I’m still a bit weirded by the idea of spending actual money to advertise a website. I guess my thinking is that, if there’s a point to this at all, people’ll bookmark the site and return every day or two, and probably tell other people to come in and do the same thing. Meaning in effect that, if you have to advertise something, it’s because no one cares enough to show up otherwise.

I know it’s not actually that simple. It just seems like it should be.

So. Given all that, I’m thinking that I might stop trying to advertise the site—at least for a while—and see where it can coast with incoming links from facebook.com and people generally telling each other to go look at something here. If nothing else, that’ll prove that advertising the site is actually a good idea.

Mostly off that topic: the everpresent Favourites Tab thing is still a problem. I actually wasn’t expecting this. Based on facebook.com, people will thump Like on every damned thing they see. Based on general feedback from people who actually like this webcomic, those aren’t the sort of moron who thumps Like ever, for any reason, including the one where it’s true. Which tells me three things:

• This webcomic, largely as designed, appeals almost exclusively to smart people who don’t tell everyone everything they like
• It’s not smart people calling in by the millions to vote on dancing chimps during American Idol.
• I need a better businessmodel.

So I’m really kinda wondering what to do about the Favourites Tab. Leave it there in the hopes that, eventually, it serves its intended purpose; repurpose it into something else logically called Favourites; delete it and maybe bring it back in years to come. I dunno.

I guess it doesn’t have to be today. Meaning that, for the moment, I can just leave it alone and keep waiting to see what happens.

Okay; so, that’s kinda that. For now. I guess I’ll go work up a few more randomish strips to get us into November. Bookmark the site and stop back to see those as they happen….

Nearly everyone I know has a tattoo. A literal dermal image of some sort. Probably because it’s 2010, and we should count ourselves lucky that it’s not a matter of mainstream fashion to amputate arms and things. Yet.

Personally, I lack tattoos. And my fallback excuse is that I can’t have a tattoo, because I can’t even leave a website alone for an entire week. So, if there was a betting pool, then no: it has nothing to do with tattoos sending people to hell….

Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the lord.
—Leviticus 19.28

I don’t believe in deities, least of all the YodHehVavHeh; but it amuses me endlessly to catch people claiming to follow that thing’s commandments while having visibly short hair and/or displaying tattoos. It’s right up there with seeing members of PETA biting their fingernails.

So, anyway: I’m still playing with the site a bit. If I’d done things correctly, you’d never see any of that; I’d have had it working and ready to go even before uploading it to the server. Instead, I launched it with little more than WordPress3.0.1 modified annoyingly by ComicPress2.9; since then, I’ve been dicking around with elements of both.

What I’ve got done as of now is updating the Advertise Tab to display links for both sorts of adverts. What I’d wanted to do was to have it also display the adverts themselves. The problem I’m running into is that, while *.php designated in the system as a post can handle an image 800 pixels wide, *.php designated as a page can’t correctly support an image 728 pixels wide. Primarily because pages, for whatever obscene reason, have that damned sidebar thing on the upper right and, to date, I haven’t been able to find it amidst several dozen inclusionary files.

Incidentally, Chrome just told me that inclusionary isn’t a word. It might be right. But I’m not gonna trust a browser implying that chrome is a proper noun. So there.

Technically, part of the blame should be placed on PW: as obvious as the coding behind the adverts might look [width="728" height="90"], trying to change it does no good. Partly, I suppose, because the adverts are relying on some midnineties imagemap code; and that’s likely preventing me from squishing the live images down to something more reasonable. I could just use a screenshot or something, but that wouldn’t update to show off the latest advert; then I’d have to sit here all day every day, replacing the image every time something new happened.

So that all sucks.

Probably, eventually, I’ll find the stupid little code forcing, like, page.php [it's not that simple; I looked] to have that damned sidebar up there on the right; then I’ll be able to do this. Until then, I’m stuck with textlinks. Which work, but aren’t really what I’d wanted.

In other news, I’ve hit yet another snag on the whole Favourites Tab paradigm. The issue now is that, while I’m used to hitting Like on a new strip around midnight ZuluTime [that translates to about dusk the night before, here in Denver], I’m now into the illadvised Character Development Week, which my personal subjective ethics prevent me from deigning to Like. So now I’m further skewing the results of the Vote by Liking Scheme by staying out of it for the moment. Otherwise, I could just go through and Like each strip [probably not all at once; I don't really wanna spam facebook.com that hard], balancing out the results: if I Like everything, then I Like nothing. Which is the problem: I don’t particularly like the strips I’ve got ready to be released this week, so it’s kinda weird to think about thumping the Like Button next to them.

All of this is irrelevant, of course; if you’re still reading, you can stop now. I just sometimes write out my process of overthinking, if only to show my work: I don’t come to dumb conclusions arbitrarily; I consider and posit and test; this way, when I don’t get a Nobel for something important, it won’t be because I wasn’t following the serpentine procedure toward complex failure.

If you are still reading: you really can stop now. That was about all I’d had to mention at the moment.

Got a couple more things done with the site.

First of all, though maybe it shouldn’t be, I added a Favourites Tab to the CMS. To date, it’s not being used for much—at least, it’s not being used for its optimal purpose. If you look at it soon enough [though I can't guess how many years you've actually got], you should see the general proposition: with a reliable sidebarbased facebook.com thingy, I can track actual favourites quantifiably and transparently…supposing that enough people eventually care. The plan at the moment is to accumulate [maybe] little Likes for each strip in the archive, and, to begin with, allow that those liked by ten people or more constitute favourites. At least until or unless more strips than not are favourited; then I’ll kick the criterion up by an order of magnitude, requiring 100 Likes, and 1,000, and whatever becomes applicable.

So, yeah: it’s probably not of critical importance yet, no strip to date having ten fans. But, if and when that changes, I’ll be set up to deal with it. Meanwhile, feel free to go through the strips to date, thumping Like on whichever of them you prefer; that’ll help me get the data I’m gonna need.

In other news….

Having got the rectangular advert in place, under the assumption that advertisers prefer those to banners and leaderboards these days, it’s looking like I was somewhat unwrong about that:

One day, we’ll look back on this and laugh at how little this site was making; or we’ll wish for the good old days.

Seventy cents a day isn’t really a lot of cash, even at one in the morning. But it’s still kinda cool for a startup site. Especially considering that I’m still awaiting a 5Day Average in the backend, the advert above being now only two days old. What I can see already in the backend [actually, you should be able to see it too, by clicking on the Advertise Here link] is that, yesterday, the site got thirteen hundred global hits. So that alone is kinda cool. I’ll keep doing this if you’ll keep coming back to see it. That work for you?

Anyway: the actual update here is that I added in the direct link for the rectangular advert, including the current price. That’s kinda encouraged, I guess, so that people won’t assume that advertising costs thousands of dollars. Until or unless it does. If we get to that point, I suppose I’ll have to rethink things and decide whether displaying the price is less about conveying immediate information and more about bragging.

Not that I’m opposed to bragging; I rawk at bragging; this one time—

You don’t care; I can see that. Let’s move on….

Actually, that’s about it for today’s updates. I’m plotting toward a couple other ideas, but I’m not real close to implementing either of them yet. I’ll let you know….