Thursday, December 18, 2008

New Features!

We went ahead and pushed out some new features tonight (or.. this morning?).
  • New comic voting frame! It's got a bunch of cool buttons to help post your favorite comics to digg, facebook, twitter, reddit, stumbleupon, and delicious. Also, it won't ask you to vote after you've already voted.
  • Personal Lists and RSS feeds! Add some comics as favorites and they'll show up in your personal list. This makes it easy to catch all your favorite comics without getting lost in the Most Recent list.
  • IsItGoodToday.com! We've rebranded the story comics page so that it now asks "Is It Good?" You can jump right to the story section if you go to www.isitgoodtoday.com.
I'm excited to see if the social network links help boost traffic. I guess we'll see!

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Finals Are Over (Kind Of)! New Features Coming

With our mistake of launching the site before exams almost in the past, we now actually have time to address critical issues!

First off, I just want to thank everyone who has been using the site. We know that there are issues, and starting today they are going to be addressed. Second, thanks to everyone that has been giving us their feedback via the blog.

Ok, so here's what we're going to be working on.

  • Changing format of story comic section to "Is It Good Today?". We feel that this is the best way to keep the site's simple voting system while giving story comics a fair chance.
  • Personalized homepages. You'll be able to add comics to your favorite's list, which will open up a new tab on the homepage that allows you to view only your favorite comics. The regular most recent and top comics will still be visible (in condensed lists), but the comics that you care about will have their own list in a prominent spot. This will allow you to keep up on your favorite story comics and regular comics in the same list.
  • New colors for the homepage. I don't know about you, but the green and blue links got pretty old.

We'll also be rolling out a bunch of smaller changes that you might not notice, but those are the main things that we're going to try and accomplish over the coming weeks.

Again, thanks a lot for visiting the site. We haven't really done any promoting yet (which we will soon, after these things are done), which makes the amount of traffic that we've gotten incredible. On that note, thanks to everyone that has been linking to us, we really appreciate it.

Oh, and we're looking for a few neat little web 2.0 "Vote at I2FT" buttons. Neither of us are very good at designing small things, and any help would be greatly appreciated. Here's a link to a giant version of our logo. The sizes that we're looking for are 100x20 (with the pepper and some text, kind of like this) and 16x16 (with just the pepper), but if you want to make other sizes, that's cool to. If we use your icons, we'll put them up somewhere on the site and give you credit.

As always, if you have any suggestions, send us an email (team at isitfunnytoday.com) or leave your comments here.

- Zack

Saturday, December 6, 2008

So About Story Comics

Hello again. 

Scott and I have been doing a lot of thinking about the role of story comics on the site. The story tab right now is admittedly not that great, and I just wanted to let everyone know that we're working on a solution.

Edit: I guess now we're more seriously considering changing the question for story comics to 'Is It Good Today?'
Originally: The idea that I think we're going to implement is a five-star system. That way, the question 'Is it funny?' doesn't apply, and some discretion is allowed when you're rating story arcs.

What do you guys think of this system? If you have any better ideas, we'd love to hear them in the comments or at team (at) isitfunnytoday.com.

P.S. What do you think of the expansion of the Top 10 to Top 20? Is it too much? We wanted to give some lesser known comics that might not have as many votes as the larger comics some exposure, so yeah that's why we did it if anyone was wondering.

P.P.S. We bought the domain i2ft.com, which should save you the trouble of typing in the longest URL ever.

- Zack

Friday, December 5, 2008

Downtime

Our host is currently suffering from a DDoS attack and is working to resolve the problem. In the meantime, the site may be a bit unstable. I'm told that the network guys are all over this but it seems like a pretty serious attack so I don't have any ETA.

Edit: Things seem to be working ok now. There is still some packet loss issues with our site, but I don't think most people will notice. It should be totally resolved pretty soon.

Sorry about all this.
-sjg

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Adding New Comics (Kind of Slowly?)

Hey guys,

This is just a post to let everyone who is submitting comics know that we are not ignoring your requests! We've just been getting a lot and it's kind of hard for two college kids to keep up with the list. We will keep up with it, but it might take a day or two after you submit (unfortunately).

We planned on eventually having an automated submission process, but we also planned on not having this many submissions early on, haha. I'm not saying it's bad that there are a lot of submissions (because it's actually great), we just weren't ready.

So basically the plot of this message is that we aren't ignoring your requests.

Also, this isn't at all meant to deter people from sending in comics, because we love getting submissions and have had a lot of fun reading through them. So keep sending them in!

EDIT: We've updated the submission guidelines, so be sure to check them out before submitting.

Thanks,
Zack

Monday, December 1, 2008

Hey Guys

So I guess we launched the site. Reception has been good, we’re getting a lot of emails about adding comics. At first we were a little bit worried about adding a lot of story comics that aren’t necessarily funny without any pretext, but we ended up adding a separate section for story comics. You should email us if you want to add a comic, regardless if it’s story comic or not. Also, you can email us if you have any cool suggestions.

We still have some issues to work out with the RSS feeds and some other stuff, but things are not bad for day one!

-sjg

P.S. We were linked from http://www.starslip.com/ , http://www.housepetscomic.com/, and http://www.thinkin-lincoln.com. Thanks dudes!