Ubersoft.net is once again a database-driven site!

Welcome back everyone. Those of you who created accounts on this site should still have them. Unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out how to share those accounts with Eviscerati.org and EvisceratiNet... so that's a bit inconvenient.

Welcome back!!

With the move over to the new site, there are a few significant changes that I want to bring to your attention:

• the RSS feed for Ubersoft.net now displays the comic images -- by subscribing to the feed, you can view the comic without ever having to come here directly.
• there are still ads on the site (via Project Wonderful), and information about what those ads are and how they work on the site can be found here.
• I have adopted a Creative Commons license for my comics (and for the rest of my content) -- specifically, an Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which allows you to repost my comics, and even modify them, as long as it is not done for profit. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but couldn't due to Keenspot policy (which should not be interpreted as a criticism of Keenspot. Keenspot makes very few outright demands on its artists, and that one is perfectly understandible.) More information on the specifics of the copyright on this site can be found here.

Also, I'm pleased to announce (and some of you will be pleased to discover) that Kernel Panic will resume regular publication on Wednesdays, starting tomorrow. Happy 4th everyone.

I am now selling merchandise:

I tried selling t-shirts a long, long time ago... it never caught on. But I really like this design, so I'm going for it again: "Technology Is Not Your Friend" is now more than just a spiffy site motto, it's a wearable spiffy site motto. Wear it to work... especially if you work in IT.

I am currently selling this through Zazzle because I can't afford to buy my own stock and ship it myself. A basic t-shirt sold at my Zazzle storefront sells for $14.95, with discounts for bulk purchases. Zazzle lets you choose your own T-shirt style and color with a pretty nifty web app (written in Flash, I think). Different styles affect the sale price.

(Also, assuming you're interested, I don't advise getting a shirt in a color other than black or white -- the image doesn't seem to work well on gray, yellow, green, blue, etc.)

For some reason the comic bookmark feature has stopped working for registered users. I'm not sure why -- I'm looking into it.

Update: I have had to disable and remove the bookmarks function for now. It was not working so thoroughly that it was actually causing MySQL database errors, which is fun in theory but I'm trying to avoid that kind of thing now that I'm responsible for fixing everything that breaks around here...

The next episode of Kernel Panic will be delayed until tomorrow...

A week ago I had to disable the bookmark feature on this site because it was generating rampant SQL errors whenever anyone tried to use it. This was a result of updating the bookmark module to a more recent verion.

I will be going back to a previous (working) version. Unfortunately, when I re-install the bookmark module all previously assigned bookmarks will be gone. I apologize for this... I was hoping to preserve them, but in trying to fix the problem I wound up breaking it more.

In other (hopefully better) news, very soon I will be adding the ability to transcribe comics to this site. This is a feature similar to what Oh No Robot provides, only it will be fully integrated into this site.

I have updated this site to Drupal 5.2 -- a security fix -- and in the process it seems to have broken something. It appears that the comments links for each article no longer update when a new comment is added to the site. The "Send in the Robots" comment, for example, currently has two comments attached to it, but the front page link still displays as "Add a comment," which is what appears when an article has no comments at all.

Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to affect the poll sitting in the far right column.

This is a fairly minor problem, though annoying, and I guess it's worth suffering through in order to fix a security hole. Hopefully I'll figure out how to fix it next week. Meanwhile, if you want to keep track of new comments made to this site you can always click the Tracker link in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

This weekend I'm headed off to Alabama to visit family, so I'll only be checking out the site sporadically. Play nice 'till I get back.

Comics are difficult to handle on the web because they contain a lot of information that can't be indexed by search engines. This can make trying to find a single comic out of a large archive a rather daunting experience.

Oh No Robot is a service that allows you to create comic transcriptions -- essentially the text "script" of an existing comic -- that can be indexed in place of the comic itself. When these transcripts are added to the comic's page, suddenly it's possible to search your comic archives!

I like what Oh No Robot did, but I wanted to be able to integrate it more fully into my site... and now it is.

It is now possible for me to easily add comic transcripts to my site. People with accounts on this site will notice that they, too, can add transcripts if they wish (in fact the tools to do so will appear automatically beneath each comic). Once a transcription has been added I can lock it down, to prevent it from being defaced at a later date.

If you see any problems with this tool, or you have any suggestions on how it could be improved, please let me know.

Once again Kernel Panic has been delayed -- it will be published tomorrow.

I've modified the site so that when a new Kernel Panic or Old Skool Webcomic is published, it will now display on the front page of the site for that day, and then disappear back into the depths of the archives. This should make it easier for fans of those comics to notice when they've updated.

In THEORY, what will happen is this: when a Kernel Panic or Old Skool Webcomic is published, it will appear on the front page for 24 hours, then disappear until the next udpate. That's the way it's supposed to work. We'll see.

I've backdated today's Kernel Panic as if it had been published at 3AM this morning (Central time), which means that (in theory) it should disappear at 3AM tomorrow morning (Central time). If it doesn't then I'll have to tinker more.