Way back on July 14 of last year, I put up a pretty lengthy rant about professionalism of free internet services and the level of commitment that Top Web Comics and BuzzComix seems to be willing to put forth.
If you recall, I had been using TWC until about July 11th or so… they also had an extended period of non-functionality. They returned, but not before I had gotten so irritated that I dumped the link and stopped using the service.
Now Buzzcomix is having an even longer period of non-functionality, and while I feel I’ve had quite a bit of patience with this service, I have to admit that my patience is at an end. My biggest struggle was I had realized that if I’m not using any voting incentive, then I’d have to put up a second page or even a whole different site for the PDQs. That led me to a number of questions: How much work did I really want to put into PDQs? Are they popular enough to run on their own? What if they overwhelm HHFM in popularity? Will this overwhelm Webmonkey Ben with website needs? What if the gravity of this decision draws a meteor in from deep space, and it lands on the hosting server??
After a lot of fretting, I finally realized that it all came down to these questions, and their subsequent answers:
Do I enjoy doing the PDQs? —Yes, I do.
Does the effort and stress of using someone else’s site and providing them with traffic justify my continued patronage if they don’t actually respect their customers? —No, it does not.
Is there enough traffic to the PDQs to justify the effort of putting up a whole separate page for them? —Yes, it does.
So here it is. PDQs get their own page. No more entreaties from me to vote for them, no more waiting for Buzzcomix or TWC to get their crap together, no more praying that they will actually stay up from week to week. Just go and read them. For the moment, we’re using the HHFM template for the PDQs, but we’ll eventually get unique page design for the PDQs.
Enjoy.
-Aleric
Hope you’re enjoying this series! There’s a couple more, and then we get to see Elise. Yeah, I’m a tease. I know.
Webmonkey Ben and I sat down this weekend, and between playing Burnout Paradise, Force Unleashed, Drawing an exact copy of the Sistine Chapel, and flying to the moon and back, we hashed out the draft of the new site, and order for which things will be going up. Some cool surprises (Like a fo… oh right… surprise) coming very shortly, so stay tuned!
Not too much else to bend your ear about today, just the same-old “remember to go VOTE! There’s a new PDQ up at Buzzcomix!” and… oh yeah.
COME SEE ME AT SILICON! (Because today, I’m drawing the Con-exclusive comic for it!)
See you there!
Aleric