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0

I want me a comic blog!

March
15

I’ve been reading xkcd and Explosm for ages and I’ve always dreamed of having a comic blog. Well, more specifically, being able to draw well enough to have a comic blog!

Now, I’m not gonna let a little thing like not being able to do something to stop from doing something. I mean, how hard can it be? ;)

Any stick will do

I have seen some literally LaughOutLoud good comics that are nothing more than a few straight lines on my stumbleupon sessions and I can’t help but think that it should be a breeze to do the same. oo-er, famous last words eh?

Check out this strip, it’s simply drawn and it made larf for ages. I sent it to 3 people!

I tried to make one in this style and it was hard! I did manage to make a simple comic once before on this blog, I used an online stickman comic maker which made things easier..

The Unsuccess

I wonder if it’ll be easier this time?

Comicpress wooot!

Enter in Comicpress which is a fantastic bit of Wordpress shennanigans that enables anyone to create and update a comic based blog without worrying about ftp and specific filenames.

It’s currently powering a huge number of comic blogs and has helped a lot of regular folks create gorgeous comics like Starship Moonhawk or Dakota McFadzeans’ Blog and I want in!

It wont be able to help your drawing skills or your humour bone tuning but it will leave you to only worry about the drawing, all the rest will be handled by the system. It can handle graphic novels, simple strip comics, multi columns, custom colours, fancy pagination and a whole lot more!

It’s mildly overwhelming how many options there are to choose from so I think my best approach will be to start with a simple default layout and get creating and publishing. As I get used to the system, I’ll know what I need to change or update.

Learn me and you some learns

I’m all set up to start doing some more screencasts on my super fast PC and the weather is getting nice enough for me to be able to stay at the main pc without my fingers becoming frozen so I think it’s time to make some tutorial videos!

What better way to generate blog fodder than to start a tutorial series! and.. what better platform to do it on than ComLuv? ;) (and it means I can use it as a legitimate ‘work’ activity)

ComicLuv

I have done some testing and I am fairly confident that it will work just as well on the live server. So, over the next few days I will be installing it to the ComLuv site as a supporter only feature. Anyone with a fiver a month can have a comic blog too!

I will be creating the comic blog and using the blogging side of it for tutorials and tales of my progress as I figure out what I use to draw the comics and other important stuff like how to draw or what is funny?

Freebies!

I’d really like to hear from you if you’ve ever considered making a comic blog, It’d be awesome to be able to have someone to compare notes with and share the journey.

What do you think? fancy making a comic on the ComLuv site? In exchange for taking the plunge with me and being someone who can chat with me about comic making, I’ll give you a full supporter account with access to all the themes and comicpress addons and a bunch of credits to get things like extra URLs on your comluv account.

It goes without saying that your new comic blog will get plenty of promotion and be mentioned along with mine in as many places as I can fit it :)

Blog News, Blog Tools


0

yes and more crashes to make the day go poof!

February
26

What an interesting week. Not content with crashing hard drives and losing data, I went through a round of Ubuntu weirdness that meant I had to change the monitor to one with a larger default resolution.

Fixed that and just got used to the mammoth monitor that now looms over the counter and Ubuntu decided it wouldn’t play nice with vmware any more. I need that vwmare to run the ancient Win98 system that handles the delivery orders.

All I can say is welcome back XP. Spent bloody ages installing an old OEM version that was lying about and even longer taking it through SP1, SP2 and SP3 updates. At last though, it all plays nice with my virtual image and USB serial adapter (for caller ID). I had to take off the webserver though which I use to serve the new order pages. I need that to work, we have new drivers who need maps!!

Home Pc plays it too

Windows 7. RC1. Finished. :-(

New Windows 7 Ulitmate installed and functioning with a VMware image of Ubuntu which is now serving the pages to all the PC’s on the shop and home network…. just in time for my Sky router to start playing up. Now a direct cable connection spazzes it out and the wireless keeps dropping off . bwahhhh!

Work..WORK

I had lots of fun things planned for ComLuv and other pet projects these past two weeks but it’s all been put aside so I can fix these real life, gotta work or we dont get paid, things. I think I am on top of most of it (except the sky router) but I’m so knackered from doing all the fire fighting that all I wanna do now is watch some movies and pretend I don’t have a PC (for a little while).

Blog News


2

oh batshit, it’s happened again. thrice

February
19

What a load of bollox! This seems to be the week I experience maximum crashage.

Hard times/drive

First, my shop pc had a hard drive crash. A massive one. The drive wouldn’t even spin! I tried the usual methods found on a Google like putting it in a plastic bag and putting it the freezer which is supposed to fix a jammed disc.

nope.

Then I tried what this page tried. Basically, swapping the logic board from an identical drive to the faulty one. That actually got the drive spinning and recognized in windows but unfortunately, it was completely trashed. Every sector screwed and no matter what software apps I threw at it, it wouldn’t play. (so I took it apart to see how it works)

Lost code

All my backups of my server where on that disc. All.of.them!

In a great wave of relief, I found that 99% of it had been updated to the live server only the day before. The 1% that didn’t just so happened to be my awesome edit of the pay-to-blog plugin which I was about to put on ComLuv. dammit, that was some good coding I added to the plugin.

It would have allowed me to set a free time limit on new blogs of say 30 days and when that runs out, the next time the blog owner tried to log on, they would be presented with a page where they can pay a piddly 5 USD to have the blog enabled for a year. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t pay then they could request a free blog and that would notify me by email and list the request on my admin page.

I’ll have to rewrite the code and I bet I can’t remember how I did it!

New install, new problems

I managed to grab another hard drive and put it in the box to replace the poop one. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 and vwmare and got all the shop POS software working with the ancient equipment we have. Sweet! until… only 24 hours of nice working, it went pooooop. Something to do with i810 video drivers missing. Cue 5 hours pissing about with sudo apt-get and other linux bollox until at last, it is working again.

And then Vmware decided to stop working with the serial port via USB. Pleh!

More sudo apt-get and 2 hours later, I found an old vwmare image for the win98 system and copied over the contents of the .vmx file and ta-da! it worked again.

No more please!

No more. thanks. done it now.

New Wheels

At least the new wheels look good on Twitpic

Even these got delayed by 3 days. Next day delivery bleeeeuuurrgh!

Blog News, Wordpress


9

Text links work to make Fired Wok number 1 Oriental Food Delivery

January
9

A customer came in to the takeaway we run and mentioned that he got to our website (Fired Wok Chinese Takeaway) only after he added the word ‘takeaway’ to his search term.

Confusing because, I was quite pleased with how the SERPS are for Firedwok and ‘chinese takeaway lancaster‘ which results (at time of writing) to this..

Straight on the map and number 1 on results (with added tags)

It turns out that he was searching for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ which made the site past page 5 on the results!

Bring on the featured links!

A few days or weeks ago, ComLuv got put up to PR6 on the homepage from Google. How nice! I mentioned this in the email newsletter and within a few hours, two links were sold on the sidebar for 30 days each. One with a subscription! woot!, might this be the first month Comluv pays for itself? lol

I thought I’d take advantage of this PR increase and put a text link for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ on with the paid ones and left it a while. In the meantime, I put some more posts on the blog portion of the takeaway website and put in some ‘oriental food’ references on the homepage.

Got me some SERPs

And now, a search for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ results in a number 1 position (and number 2)

1 portion of SERPS please

Very happy with my text link purchase, and because I own the site it means it was free! haha :-)

I guess I can take it down now, it’s done it’s job and it can make some space for another paid ad.

It’s not just me

A paid customer bought a link for UK payday loans back when that search term had them after page 10 (I tested it when they first bought the link) and now that term results in them being on page 1 of google.

They even asked why I had no subscription option for the ads! I switched it on and straight away, I had 50$ per month subscriptions coming in. Very nice!

Get YOU some links

If I can sell a few more links on subscription, I’ll have enough to upgrade the server to more memory and a faster processor. It’s typical that the first time the site has made enough money to pay for it’s own server and bandwidth, it reaches capacity again and needs upgrading! lol. what a fun ride!

You can buy featured homepage links and network wide footer links on the ComLuv page here

Blog News, Making / Made Money, ecommerce


7

Brrr! Amazing recent picture of the UK from space

January
8

This picture taken yesterday by NASA

Click the image to download a high-res version.

Blog News


8

Snow day! Schoolboy = YES, Business Owner = NOOoo

January
5

I used to love winter, I used to love it even more if it snowed. Snowy roads, especially in the UK, means massive disruption to public services and roads. It used to mean no school, later it meant no need to trudge to work. Now, as a business owner with a large percentage of business relying on deliveries, it means glum faces all around!

Ice skating anyone?

It’s not too bad, we still get the usual suspects who battle through any kind of weather to get the chips, fried rice and curry sauce in a box. Somehow, the grocery deliveries happened and only the carrotts were missing! They’ll battle through the narrow streets to us again just deliver a bag of carrotts. Try that in London..

Tomorrows forcast is for bright skies, I hope it clears the snow off the roads long enough to get some sweet & sour chicken out to the masses! :-) The weather doesn’t look too good for the South of the country though, there’s a 18 inch snowfall predicted down there. oo-er!

How has the weather been affecting your area? do you love the snow or hate it?

Blog News


4

Sick, lazy, no wait, definitely sick

December
30

My first day off in 9 months and it turns into a sick day! OMG I am super flu’d up and my plans for sketching out the new CommentLuv have been skuppered :(

That's not a moon! thats the flu virus

I think I’ll have to try and do some stuff on my laptop that needs doing to the ComLuv site. Things like, a daily visit list of CommentLuv enabled sites based on the most comments received. There are other maintenance tasks I have to do but that’ll take my main pc and it’s bloody cold in my computer room!

Not quite like this but nearly!

Seriously! it’s right cold oop North. Couple that with the fact that the flat above the takeaway has single pane glass in the windows and the one in my computer room has a broken latch which prevents it from closing and you’ve got a perfect recipe for bloody freezing!

All my development work has grinded to a halt because of this cold weather and with it being Christmas and we’re one less chef in the kitchen, there is a huge amount of work to be done in the offline world of a Chinese takeaway. I felt quite stressed in the beginning of this period where I couldn’t get any coding done but rather than get emotionally damaged by the pressure of all this code and web stuff, I decided to just concentrate on what is paying the bills and supporting the family for a bit.

There’s no real problems with CommentLuv at the moment, it’s working on WP2.9 and the ComLuv site is surviving and only just now starting to make some pennies with adsense and kontera so hopefully, nothing major will happen between now and spring so I can start some serious coding again. Pah, who am I kidding? I wont be able to last until spring! lol, guess I’ll have to take another unpaid day away when I’m better just so I can exercise my brain.

Now back to my snot filled hankies. where the hell does all this snot come from? something must be losing out on liquids in my body so all this snot can be produced. bleurgh

Blog News


11

They go in 3’s too

November
24

You know how the expression says that problems come in 3’s ? I get 3 lots of 3’s most of time but this week I think I have managed to get rid of 3 problems.

I was posting about my woes at Comluv and just a few days later I finally managed to track down the random freezes on my AsRock M3A790GXH – 128M motherboard and OCZ DDR3 Gold Series RAM

Random crashes on Vista/7 – AsRock M3A790GXH/128M with OCZ DDR3 Gold RAM – Solved

Shiny, SHINY! RAM!

Shiny, SHINY! RAM!


The crashes were driving me crazy, I could never repeat the action that caused the crash and there was never any entry in the event log except for after the reboot. I tried removing one stick and running it with that one to see if it was a faulty stick, it crashed on the first try so I thought that was it but after swapping it with the other stick, the pc crashed within a day. :(

It turns out that OCZ DDR3 RAM needs 1.9v instead of the regular 1.5v that it would get from the motherboard. A quick visit to the bios and I switched the DRAM voltage to 2.0v and the pc has been up and running for days without a problem. yey!

Dedicated server non responsive after high traffic – solved

They put the fast in, um, ukfast :)

They put the fast in, um, ukfast :)


Another problem was my server, it is fast and a nice bit of kit but it was getting overloaded at times with so many requests to the CommentLuv API. I had a word with UKFast explaining to them that I expected my server to be able to stay up if a lot of traffic came in. They did their utmost to help and sent me a very nicely priced invoice to beef up my server with an extra 1 GB of RAM.

It’s been up for 7 days and the CTM graphs are showing me that my CPU usage and system load are down a lot from what they’ve been.

Monthly view upgrade shows better performance

Monthly view upgrade shows better performance

Looks more dramatic on the 1 year chart

Looks more dramatic on the 1 year chart

My last issue was my laptop charger, it went poof! I did a search online for a universal charger and the best price I could see was over 60 quid! luckily, I was able to buy a Toshiba charger from ebay for 9.99 for next day delivery.

sorted! (for now)

Blog News, Code


12

The shame me into action post

October
28

I’ve got so many bloody projects on the go that they’ve all stopped!

Here’s a list for future me to read to feel the future shame..

06 Nov *edit* made some progress!

  1. Intense Debate Commentluv
    • I need to split up the css so it’s in a separate file
    • I need to add a check for existence of jquery at the start and load it if not already loaded
    • I need to pretty up the extra url field
    • I need to hide the existing url field on a logged out form and populate it with the value in the one I added with the script
  2. Premium Support page
    • Create the different charge bands
    • Create paypal buttons with IPN url
    • Create said IPN receiving script
    • Integrate it with the comluv affiliate plugin for paying referral site
  3. Premium Extras
    • Create different charge groups
    • Create paypal buttons
    • Create IPN receiving script
    • Integrate said script with affiliate payment
  4. Referral contest
    • Work out the prizes
    • Type up the description post
    • Set up a single area for entries

That’ll do for now, there’s more but I’m getting depressed

Blog News


2

My video interview at UKFast Offices

October
15

I was invited down to Manchester by UKFast some weeks ago to talk about CommentLuv and answer a few questions about the site and why their server is so bloody awesome (it really is!).

Here’s the vid

Some of my soundbytes got included in another video too, must have said some good things :)

Blog News, video blogging