Blogging on my Blog

by Dave Rapp on February 21, 2012 at 4:30 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

I feel the need to write or post something here. Seriously, it’s overpowering now. Until recently, I had dedicated the index page of my website to news posts and that sort of thing, and I organized it in a blog-like layout because that’s what made sense. But I didn’t consider it necessary to post actual content, or to post with any sort of regularity, because that’s what the comic was for. It wasn’t meant to be a blog, despite what a certain friend of mine insisted on a few occasions. (you know who you are, Patrick)

But I kind of can’t fall back on that excuse anymore. I’m using goddamn WordPress. This entire website is now a great big blog. I feel like I should be using it for… well…    blogging!

What do people blog about on blogs anyway? The only blog or blog-like things I have any familiarity with are the news posts on Penny Arcade, the Best Page in the Universe, and I was recently introduced to Hyperbole and a Half. I feel like I should write something insightful about current events or the political climate. Except I don’t watch the news and even back when I did, all I could stomach were the Daily Show and Colbert Report. Maybe I should write something silly but I don’t think I’m that funny a lot of the time.

I guess I should talk about LEGO stuff here? I think a lot of you guys like LEGO things. You’re reading a LEGO comic and most of you found my comic through other LEGO-related comics out there. Except for a few who came here from the OOTS or MSPA forums after I posted there a bunch with a link to my website in my sig. Do you guys like LEGOs? I think they’re kind of cool. I make a comic out of them.

I can’t think of anything else to say here so I’m just going to post this.

9 Comments

Phase Two: Complete (updated)

by Dave Rapp on February 18, 2012 at 4:29 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

Well, most of it anyway. The Sitemeter code and BCN dropdown are both in place, the site is functional and doesn’t look like garbage, and the long process of creating thumbnails and checking for errors for every page in the archives is complete. I found and corrected some mistakes that were years old, and also added some commentary to pages where something to say crossed my mind. Most of the commentary is back in Arc 1 and I might add more when I think of more things to talk about. I have three post-it’s on my monitor for possible topics of discussion, so it’s pretty likely. Now I just have to figure out how I’m going to handle the Extras and I’ll be good to go.

Regarding the big empty project wonderful ad to the right – I’m considering getting rid of it and replacing it with something more appealing. If you’ve been on the BCN forums, you probably know my stance on advertising and art. Believe me when I say that the ad’s very presence is starting to annoy me. The fact that it’s sitting at zero dollars and zero cents and not contributing to the site in even such an indirect way as “help pay for hosting costs” is making me question the worthwhileness of its existence.

‘course, it’s not like I have anything better to stick there. So for the moment it stays.

For the moment.

Anyway, this post is being written at about 4:30 am while I wait for a gigabyte worth of thumbnails and corrected strips to upload via FTP. And I have a headache. If I have something more meaningful to say, I’ll make another post in the morning or something. And unless something happens to slow me down, there will be new strips going up starting on Tuesday.

edit: I didn’t do my homework. The ad wasn’t “activated.” So the ad was not able to accept bids, which might have been why it was sitting at $0. I’ve rectified this, so the ad will remain at least for a few more days so I can see how it behaves. I figure best case scenario it generates a couple cents a day, maybe. I only need to make about 33 cents a day to completely cover the cost of hosting the site, so fingers crossed.

3 Comments

Comments re-enabled

by Dave Rapp on January 18, 2012 at 4:19 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

After applying a generous helping of IP blacklisting, I found that the spam had slowed to a crawl. The site is getting, like, one per day so far, and that’s easily slow enough for me to keep the comments in manually approve/disapprove mode. So commenting on all posts has been re-enabled.

I’d like to share one of the spam posts though, because I find it so out of context that it’s sort of funny. Here goes.

um actually, I’m adopted. my mother was a pregnant teen and adopted me out to an American family. granted, I don’t particularly like America, but there’s no way she would have known that then. she cared about me enough to let another family raise me and try to give me everything. that’s rude to say parents who give children away don’t care. some definitely do. I probably wouldn’t have grown up to be an engineer if I had stayed in that life, and I really appreciate her giving me the chance to be.

This was to be posted on strip #200 and had a link to some sex webcam site. Exactly what a spam post like this is meant to accomplish is still something that perplexes me.

One other thing. I wrote a review for a set from that stupid LEGO Friends line. I may be considered just the tiniest bit NSFW in your boss is a 60-year-old tightass suffering from a serious case of malignant intelligence-cancer. But you can read it here. I’m going to make a page for reviews for things and tutorials for stuff, but right now I’m still going through the archives.

7 Comments

Phase Two: 7.9% complete (also spam)

by Dave Rapp on January 10, 2012 at 6:01 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

I got a little side tracked, but the process of combing through the archives, fixing things, creating thumbnails, and adding notes and commentary is coming along nicely, if a bit slowly.

Unfortunately, some robot out there decided that it likes my website and won’t leave me alone. Started a little after midnight, random pages in the archives started recieving a huge influx of comment spam. All of it is generic crap like “An answer from an eexprt! Thanks for contributing.” and I can’t even figure out what the spambot’s goal is. Also, every comment has one intentional typo in one word, presumably to throw off automated spam filters. Lucky for us, my site doesn’t have an automated spam filter, it has a manual one. Any time someone tries to post a comment on any post, their comment automatically gets witheld and doesn’t post until an admin (me) approves it manually, unless the poster has had a comment approved previously. Which means none of you should see one single spam post. But the moderation queue is still getting full fast enough to annoy the crap out of me, so for the moment I’ve disabled commenting on any posts more than two weeks old.

I’m thinking over the various way to get around this. Adding a captcha that needs to be filled out in order to post a comment might do the trick, but I really don’t want to have to do that. For the moment I’m just blacklisting the spambot’s IP addresses and hoping for the best, but I’m hoping for a third option. Commenting is still enabled on this post, so if any of ya’ll have a suggestion to deal with this nuisance, I’d love to hear it.

And once again, thank you all for your continued patience as I pull this site together.

8 Comments

Phase One: Complete

by Dave Rapp on January 1, 2012 at 5:15 am
Posted In: Blog Posts

As I type this, the long process of renaming all the comics in my archive to be compatible with Comicpress’ system is complete, and everything has been uploaded. The entire archive for Brick Earth Saga (up to this point) is available for browsing.

Unfortunately this was the easy part. Now I have to go through every page, one at a time, and check for errors. I’ll also be adding commentary as I go, wherever I see something I feel like commenting on. Which, knowing me, is going to be all over the place. I also need to go through the plethora of settings and styling options at my disposal to make this website not look like a generic gray and silver piece of crap, plus add a banner/logo/whatever, some pages for the Extras section and the old bios page, as well as stick the BCN dropdown somewhere. I’m also considering getting some wordpress ads set up, and I need to get my sitemeter tracker back up and running.

All of this is phase two. It’ll take a while. Once it’s done, or at least close enough to being done that the website is fully functional in the way that I want it to be, normal comicing will resume, and we’ll finally continue where I left off back in September. I know it’s been a long wait. I humbly request that you, noble reader, wait just a little bit longer, as I put my act back together.

Thank you all very much for your patience and support.

Oh and the comments are working, so feel free to leave one. If you don’t want to do that you can email me. I promise I read everything and I respond as best I can.

9 Comments