Reducing your comic's load time

Member MoJones wrote an impressive guide to making your comic load faster on your site. I want to post it here so it doesn't get buried.

I've been obsessed with page-load speeds for years, and I've learned quite a bit in that time - although I am by no means an expert. Page-load speed isn't just a user experience issue - although it is certainly that - it can also affect your Google page rank. Useful tools for monitoring and analysing your page load speed are pingdom.com and a the pagespeed Firefox plugin (yslow is also handy, but it hates Wibya, and will mark you down for using it). Pingdom tests your site from a server in Europe, so if your host is in the US it might show slower results than if you tested withWebpagetest with its multitude of locations to choose from - but Pingdom is useful as a benchmark. I'm using a WordPress/Comicpress(2.7) install, because that's what I started with five years ago. There is an argument that says if speed is your priority, you shouldn't use Wordpress at all - and that's a fair point. WP is great, but it's big. If there is a leaner system out there that does everything I need and is secure, I'll switch to it.

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Friday Archive Dive: Addresses for Press Releases

Today's Archive Dive comes from Jan. 27, 2010. It's a listing of contact information for media outlets that run webcomics-related news. Feel free to add any I missed.

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The Cease-and-Desist Letter: A Case Study

Howard Tayler recently announced that one of his comic's running gags was the object of a cease-and-desist letter. His response provides and enlightening case study in handling such matters.

Here's the background. A running gag in Schlock Mercenary is "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates." It is a clear parody of Stephen Covey's bestselling "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." This was a simple matter of a company defending its trademark. And the Covey trademark was the number 7 in conjunction with the word "habit." If they don't defend that, they risk losing their rights to it. As Tayler explains in his blog:

If you let somebody infringe upon your mark, eventually it's not yours anymore and anybody can make stuff with your mark or logo on it. This is why Disney is so aggressive about Mickey's silhouette, and why if you look closely at advertisements for certain Android OS devices you'll see that "Droid" is a trademark of Lucasfilm, and is used under license.

We'll discuss this situation as a case study in handling such matters, and Howard answers a brief Q&A to give a little more background.

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Is it SPAM? Finding the line

Most of us are shameless self-promoters -- it's the nature of what we do. We wouldn't be publishing our own work on the Web if we didn't want people to read it, and people aren't going to read it unless we tell them about it.

But in the process of trying to tell people about our work, it's very easy to cross the line and end up angering the people we're trying to enlist as readers. And that's bad for business.

So the question becomes: When does harmless self-promotion turn into SPAM?

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Health insurance

In a recent discussion about securing insurance for your studio/storage space, the question was raised about health insurance. Here are six good places to help you solve that issue.

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