Usually I’m not too keen on asking for donations, but circumstances are forcing my hand so I’ve placed a tips jar on Odd-Fish.
As I’ve mentioned before,
several UK Internet Service Providers including the one I’m with, Virgin Media, are installing spyware called Phorm on their servers in order to track its customers we habits, read their email and generally look over our shoulders in order to give us ‘more relevant advertising’ so I’m moving ISP to a small company who have pledged that they will never implement Phorm or anything like it. Unfortunately, moving ISP involves the purchase of a new telephone line and new broadband modem and router, an expense I really don’t need right now because of my other, more important reason for the tips jar.
My cat, Ziggy, an eleven year old huge tabby tomcat has developed a lump on his ‘wrist’ and is now only using three legs. The Vet says it might be a tumor (hopefully benign) but he has to go for an x-ray and possibly other tests then surgery if it can be removed. The x-ray alone is going to cost between £100 and £300 ($190 to $580) so I am throwing myself on your mercy.
If you enjoy my little corner of the web, if Odd-Fish makes you smile, please leave a couple of pennies, whatever you can afford in the PayPal tips jar so that I can still eat once Ziggy’s vet bills are paid.
Thank you in advance.

On Wednesday and Thursday visits to Odd-Fish took a major upturn. Instead of my usual 8 to 10 thousand daily page views I got 31000 for Wednesday and 37000 for Thursday all thanks to Stumbleupon users liking the ‘Strife & Nightlife‘ comic.
Delightful though it was it caused some headaches.
My image host, Servage, decided that I was using too many resources and pulled the plug on me without warning.
I had to desperately move everything to different hosting as quickly as possible. Of course all this happened during an upturn in traffic so lots of people got to see a comic site with no damn comic.
I specifically chose the host I was using because of their huge bandwidth allowance- 5000gb a month but it wasn’t because of bandwidth they killed me. Oh no, I’ve only used 83gb at the time of writing this. No, they pulled the site because I was getting too many hits at once, or to put it another way, my site was too busy and it slowed their server.
If a simple comic site can do that I hope no one they host ever tries to run a business on their server! a few too many customers shopping at Christmas and bang goes their site.
What the hell is the point of having five terabytes of bandwidth if the server can’t cope with user load to match!
What REALLY got me angry was even when the traffic rush was over and I’d moved some files elsewhere to lighten the load they point-blank refused to unsuspend my account until the 12 hour punishment period expired. What sort of crappy customer service is that? Way to piss off your customers guys!
Anyway sod them. I’m closing the account and going to a host that doesn’t power their servers with Sinclair Spectrums.
Rant over. Smiling now.

I’ve been invited to join a collective called the Sage Comic Collective. It’s due to be launched in the next couple of weeks and at the moment is invitation only.

Obviously I’m flattered by the invitation and would like to join but I have one reservation.
The graphic they want me to add to my site to indicate that I’m part of the collective is large, obtrusive and makes it look like Odd-Fish one of Sage’s brands or at least is hosted by sage rather than just affiliated with them.

I’ve always been proud that my sites are independently hosted and coded by hand and I’ve spent a lot of time and money on them including registering the domain and paying for hosting myself but I think that their logo undermines this.
It’s a corner flash that goes over the top of my site design making it look like the branding that one of the free comic hosts like DrunkDuck does.
I’d be happy to use a large button in my side bar but they are insisting on the corner flash. I don’t know what to do. Should I join?