Okay, so: I have been work­ing on the site redesign. It is coming together! I think you will like it. I am hoping hoping hoping it will be up and run­ning some­time tomor­row night.

While work­ing on the Oh No Robot inte­gra­tion I real­ized that I hadn’t been get­ting email notices about pend­ing tran­scrip­tions. I had inter­preted the lack of noti­fi­ca­tions to mean that we just weren’t get­ting people transcribin’; instead, it turns out there were a whole slew of tran­scrip­tions wait­ing to be approved! Due to my crummy admin­is­tra­tive prac­tices, they lan­guished unused and unseen for far too long. Def­i­nitely my bad. I feel pretty bummed about it!

ANYWAY, I just approved them. And I promise to keep a much better eye on the Oh No Robot queue from now on. I can only hope our awe­some tran­scribers haven’t gotten too dis­cour­aged by my lameness!

In other news, I am going to be out of town for three or so weeks start­ing this Wednes­day. Where will I be? Swat­ting mos­qui­toes and out­run­ning jaguars in Brazil. Seri­ously! John will be tend­ing things while I’m away.

This means a few things for the site:

1. John and I are going to try to do the whole “distance collaboration” thing while I’m away. We’ve done this before (we were on oppo­site sites of the coun­try for most of the comic’s run) so we’re hoping it won’t affect updates too much. That said, don’t be sur­prised if you see one or two filler strips during the next few weeks.
2. In a clev­erly thought out scheme, I sched­uled our major site redesign to go live mere hours before I take my leave from the coun­try. Still, if some­thing goes wrong with the site (as it invari­ably will) please email me with your prob­lem. My net access will be some­what inter­mit­tent, but I’ll try to sort out the issue as quickly as pos­si­ble. In gen­eral, we ask for your patience if any­thing goes wrong with the site.
3. I won’t promise any blog posts while I’m away—but who knows! At the very least I’ll do a wrap-​up of the trip once I get back. In the mean­time, John’s in charge of the blog. What will he do with it? No one knows.