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?

No I’m not pretending to be a cow, I’m actually referring to MOO, an online print company that produces a small range of print-on-demand media for the small person like me.
What makes MOO different is that their quality and attention to detail is quite simply outstanding while their prices are fantastic.
This morning I got my first batch of MOO mini-cards. These are small cards, sold in packs on 100, half the size of a traditional business card printed with my designs. Big deal you may say. Whoop-de-do, you might exclaim. Well let me continue. Not only are the cards full colour, fantastically clear and sharp, but when you order a pack of one hundred cards you can have up to one hundred different designs! That’s right! upload two images and get a pack of 100 cards and there’ll be 50 of each design. Upload 50 designs and you’ll get two of each, upload 100 designs and you’ll get a pack of 100 cards, every one different! They’re packed in a classy looking impact-resistant plastic box and mailed to you withing a couple of days.
To cap it all, a pack of 100 cards is only a tenner. That’s right Ten Pounds and they ship to anywhere in the world.
I’m impressed. Can you tell?

At some point, if Odd-Fish continues to grow and become popular, I’d really like to be able to offer readers some kind of Odd-Fish toys.
Either plushies (I mean, who wouldn’t love a cuddly pink octopus?) or/and vinyl ‘art toys’ would be nice.

I’ve looked into the plushies already and it’s certainly do-able but needs an absolute HEAP of cash upfront, the best quote I got was about $4000 per character!!

The vinyl idea has been more troublesome. I’ve spent a great deal of time surfing the ‘net looking for plastic or vinyl toy manufacturers who do ’short runs’ but have come up totally blank. The only toy manufacturers I can find are in China or Japan and absolutely none of them have any information about custom manufacturing on their sites.
There is one huge gap in the market here for anyone who can come up with a cost effective way of providing a ‘print on demand’ set up for vinyl toys. It could work by the user designing their object in 3DMAX or whatever then uploading the file together with the associated skin as a bitmap. Then the artist can sell his creation through his or her site with orders going via the manufacturer in a CafePress kind of set-up.
It may sound far fetched, but something similar is already available for World of Warcraft players who can have their online character rendered as a model and sent to them. It’s quite expensive ($100 per figure) and it uses an epoxy plaster rather than vinyl, but it’s just a matter of time before someone figures out how to do it in plastic and for sensible money.

If I had a way of getting the cash, I’d do it myself!