I’m a Webcomic Consumer

Webcomic Consumer - by C-Section Comics

I’m so lucky, lucky me –
I get all my comics free.
I read one, I read many,
I don’t need to pay a penny.

If I love it, good for me:
continuing my laughing spree!
Tweet, share and upvote of course –
I’ll do these without remorse.

But if I hate it I just might
comment on the artist’s site:
-click- -click- -click-, let’s hit submit:
“Your comic is a piece of shit.”

You may think I’m kinda rude,
but I’m just helping out the dude:
thanks to me the artist knows
just how much his comic blows.

——————

Forget webcomic fans or webcomic readers – the webcomic consumer changes the way we treat comics, for better or worse, since, oh, around 1998…

——————

Here are some more comics about how the internet changes things.

C-Section Comics, 3.0

C-Section comics has a new design – (RSS & E-mail subscribers, go check it out).

Scrum is happy again!

It’s been more than six years since the last major update to the site’s design, and a lot has changed since then. Today, according to my Google Analytics, most of you visit the site using their smartphones. Also, those of you who do use desktop computers obviously have a much higher screen resolution than you did back in 2012. The new website design addresses both of these points – it uses a responsive layout to cater the needs of smartphone and tablet visitors, and it takes advantage of the high resolution that desktop users have on their screens – up until now all our cartoons were 750 pixels wide, but the new layout will allow me to post images of greater quality.

The new design uses a versatile (and highly popular) responsive WordPress Template called Fluida,
and the great Comic Easel plug-in currently developed by Philip M. Hofer.

I’ll continue to make some tweaks to the website in the upcoming weeks. If you find something is broken, or if you think something can be done better, please let me know. Either contact me or leave a comment in the comment section below.

Now go read some comics!

Site comments, RSS updates and other site news

Here are a few updates on what’s going on with the site:

  1. As of yesterday it’s no longer possible to post comments on the site.
    In the past year I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in the number of submitted comments, even though the number of visitors to the site increased significantly. Most of you seem to prefer discussing the comics on Facebook, GPlus, Twitter, Reddit and the likes, and that’s totally cool.
    On the other side of the equation, the number of spam comments on the site soared. Installing popular anti-spam plug-ins decreased their numbers slightly, but the numbers were still overwhelming – on an average week I moderated about two to five authentic comments, and close to a thousand(!) spam comments.
    Taking both sides of the equation into account, I decided to disable comments on the site. I know this may be frustrating to some of you, but I hope it’s for the best, as the time saved on moderating comments will be dedicated to producing more comics.
    Note that even though you can’t see your previous comments, they’re still here. If the day comes when I decide to restore comments to the site, your old comments would be restored as well.
    If you want to contact me personally, you can still do it here, or just Tweet / FB mesasge / GPlus message me.
  2. Social media updates: More than 4700 of you follow our comics on Facebook, more than 1400 on Twitter, and almost 200 on GPlus. Several hundreds of you are subscribed via e-mail, and roughly 1500 of you via RSS. Just wanted to say thank you all for your support!
  3. Speaking of RSS, a few months ago Google announced it’s closing Google Reader. Reader will not be available as of July 1st 2013. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s strongly recommended that you switch to a new reader (and best do it before July 1st, since some RSS readers allow you to import your Google Reader feeds). There are many such services – personally I’ve chosen Feedly, but Netvibes and Newsblur are also good alternatives. (EDIT: Following this post I got a mail suggesting I add RSSOwl [ http://www.rssowl.org/ ] and Tiny Tiny RSS [ http://tt-rss.org/ ] to the list. Thanks, Vedran!)
  4. Last layout change for today – the blog section no longer appears in the homepage. If you want to see all blog posts, click on “Blog” in the upper menu. Viewing comics is still as same as before.

If you have any suggestion or questions regarding the latest changes, feel free to contact me.

Yours, Idan

3 Short Announcements [Site News]

  1. Thanks to everyone who joined our new Google Plus page! As promised, one of you gets to be featured in one of our future cartoons. And the winner is…  Nitin Shetty! Congratulations Nitin, please contact me here for instructions on what to do next.
  2. In the next couple of weeks I’ll start moving old posts from our Tumblr blog and integrate them to the site. If you’re an RSS subscriber or e-mail subscriber, these posts may pop up in your feed/mailbox, I apologize in advance for this slight inconvenience.
  3. As promised, within a few weeks we’ll have a new raffle for ALL our regular subscribers and readers – with cool prizes! More details soon…

That’s it. See you soon with a brand new comic!

Yours,

Idan

We’re On The Map (The Internet Map, That Is)

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 04

The Internet Map (http://internet-map.net/) is a cool new website which maps the top 350,000 sites on the internet by similarity and popularity. According to Gizmodo, “each site is represented by a circle whose size depends on the amount of traffic, and the space between each one is determined by the frequency with which users jump from one to another.”  Furthermore, websites are clustered together according to their content. Quoting Ruslan Enikeev, the site’s developer:

As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.

Importantly, clusters on the map are semantically charged, i.e. they join websites together according to their content. For example, a vast porno cluster can be seen between Brazil and Japan as well as a host of minor clusters uniting websites of the same field or similar purposes.

Being a typical Generation-Y narcissist, I immediately rushed to check where C-Section Comics is located. Here are some photos (click each photo for a larger image):

C-Section Comics is a relatively small planet, orbiting the gas giant Reddit (that’s the giant light blue planet left of us).

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 01

Zooming out, we could see that we are located in a cluster which (as far as I can tell) contains mainly geeky image based sites. Geekologie and Dorkly are geek blogs (lots of tech and gadget related stuff), while Threadless.com is a “design a T-shirt” site which contains lots of geek designs.

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 2

Zooming out farther, we are now viewing a cluster which mainly consists American image based sites. 9GAG, Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, Flickr, etc. (I’m not really sure what “American” means here – 9GAG for example is based in Hong Kong. I assume “American” indicates where the majority of the website’s crowd comes from).

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 03

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 04

You can explore the map yourself and find where your favorite sites are located by visiting http://internet-map.net/

And if you find any interesting insights, please share them with the rest of the class.