Sorry about the down­time yes­ter­day. As far as I can tell, our host (Dreamhost) was having issues. Annoy­ing, I know, but it appears to be better now.

Just a heads-​up: we’ve added a Project Won­der­ful ad box to our side­bar as a way of help­ing to sub­si­dize our Project Won­der­ful ad cam­paigns. If Google Ana­lyt­ics speaks the truth, then these ad cam­paigns were how more many of our cur­rent read­ers found Chronil­log­i­cal in the first place! Indeed, the great cycle of adver­tis­ing spi­rals on.

It’s not a par­tic­u­larly big ad box, nor is it in an insis­tently bla­tant spot, so we hope you don’t mind ter­ri­bly. And I can assure you that this is not the first step in our Master Plan to clog the site up with moun­tains of ads.

If you’re still cha­grined by the whole idea, think of it this way: now you can say that you read Chronil­log­i­cal back before we sold out! Think about how hip and indie that will make you. The answer is: extremely hip and indie.

Today is the day! Today is the day that his­tory changes us all. Or … per­haps it isn’t that aus­pi­cious. But the site is dif­fer­ent! Snazzy, right? Couldn’t have done it with­out Greg, who may have offi­cially Left the Build­ing (or will do so within the next 12 hours, I’d imagine).

What you need to know: things aren’t 100% fin­ished, and I’ll most likely add some con­tent here and there over the next few days. Like Greg said, he’ll still have “intermittent” inter­net access, so send any tech­ni­cal prob­lems his way (I’d gladly take them, but am unfor­tu­nately code illit­er­ate). That’s greg [at] chronil­log­i­cal [dot] com.

So take a look around! Famil­iar­ize your­self with the face of the future. Chronillogical’s future, at any rate.

Two things:

• It would seem as though my timing is impec­ca­ble. This very day same day I write my dia­tribe about asyn­chro­nous RSS thinga­ma­jig­gers, David Morgan-​Mar of Irreg­u­lar Web­comic announces that he’s got it cov­ered. He even gave it a catchy name: Archive Binge. Now, I haven’t actu­ally tried it yet (I’ve been busy—see point below) so I can’t judge, but it may very well be the answer I was look­ing for.

  [EDIT: After trying out the site, I must say I'm impressed. But I have con­cerns. First, every­thing is fun­neled through their site: you need to reg­is­ter to use the ser­vice, which cre­ates a bar­rier to use. Also, the selec­tion of feeds is some­what lim­ited (though they already have some heavy hit­ters like Won­der­mark and Dr. McN­inja). This isn't too sur­pris­ing, given how young the site is (1 day old). I hope and expect that the number of par­tic­i­pat­ing will strips increase substantially.

  How­ever! The process for adding your site to the list is not pain­less. From the FAQ, they need:

  A way to figure out the URL of the web page con­tain­ing each strip, given the strip number. This can be done three ways:

  1. If you can give us a sprintf format string, into which we can just plug the number, that's great.
  2. If your comics are indexed by date or some other method that doesn't map neatly to strip number, then we need a list of the strip page URLs, in order. In most cases, a simple direc­tory list­ing should suffice.
  3. If your site struc­ture is obvi­ous enough to us, we can prob­a­bly just work it out our­selves. We'll let you know if we can do this.

  I'm not sure how many cre­ators are will­ing to do this. Fur­ther­more, a ton of web­comics nowa­days are using Comic­Press, which cre­ates page URLs in a way that seems rather incom­pat­i­ble with Archive Binge's system.

  My ver­dict: Archive Binge seems like a ser­vice geared more towards the hard­core web­comics reader than the aver­age user. It's def­i­nitely a useful tool, and I heartily com­mend David Morgan-​Mar (and co.) for being leagues ahead of me on this one. But I still think some­thing like a Word­press plug-​in would be extremely valu­able to cre­ators. Direct­ing read­ers through a third-​party site is not the most user-​friendly propo­si­tion. A simple link on the front page of a blog/comic would be best.]

• For unknown rea­sons, the data­base went down ear­lier today. I was able to restore it from a backup, but we lost com­ments. Specif­i­cally, I believe we lost two com­ments from Cliff, one from me, and one from galatae. My apolo­gies! To make up for the loss, I offi­cially offer Cliff and galatae a full refund of their sub­scrip­tion to Chronillogical.