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!
20 comments:
Just a suggestion, I'd like to see the Top Ten feed send out just one post a day with links to the ten comics, if there's any way that's possible. Less feed clutter that way.
Neat! You're going to have to weight things by how many votes an entry has got, though. Right now, anything with one yes vote counts the same as a thing with ten votes, all yes :)
@InShaneee: That's a really good idea, we'll definitely fix that as soon as possible.
@jinxtigr: We do have something like that in place. A comic doesn't actually have a ratio until it has 5 votes. We'll probably up the threshold later, we're just kind of experimenting now.
Also, I've been playing with the random comic link and it's very promising- quick way to do a lot of votes.
It would be great to see a 'random' feature like that- on the vote-frame- that is biased towards stuff that hasn't got many votes. Otherwise stuff will drop right off the radar.
Don't get me wrong, I do know this is your first day. This seems like a great site idea if it can be made to work... especially for comics that aren't the big leaguers like PVP etc. Those will get a lot of attention, but unknowns that are actually able to be funny could really win here through the random thing :) I know I saw funny comics I'd never heard of, already, first day.
You guys were linked from thinkin lincoln too.
Er, guys ...
did you mean to have a 'thumbs down' tag appear when you mouse over the 'up' arrow, and vice versa?
@James: Thanks for letting us know, I added them to the list.
@MadScientist: Whoops, that's fixed now. Thanks for the heads up.
It would be a bit more computationally intensive, but you should totally do a personalized system. Have new users rate 100 comics and then base "is it funny" suggestions on the ratings that they gave as compared to the ratings of people with similar taste.
@Chris I think the first thing that we'll probably do is allow you to customize the homepage by excluding comics or only including certain comics.
Cross referencing different users is a definitely a cool idea though. In the future I want to look into this. I've been talking about doing something like the "Everybody Votes" channel on the Wii where you can compare your tastes to others, and comic suggestions would be probably in the same vein here.
This is a big job though, so these features would probably be a bit further in the future.
WHOOPS. Repost.
I'm curious if it's intentional that comics that don't update every day stay in the Top 10 Today spot until their next updates, so that a good comic might sit in there accumulating funny votes for days or a week versus a good comic that updates more frequently being bumped off to start anew every day.
It seems a little unfair (from a creator's perspective) but more importantly it seems less than useful from a reader's perspective -- if I'm checking IsItFunnyToday every day, the Top 10 list is getting clogged with older materia.
@Miles So, originally we thought this was a good idea. Consider the user that might not see the site every day. It sort of makes sense for a comic to be in the top10 for a at least a little while. The way it is now, only comics that are a week old get kicked out of the top10 for time.
But I see where you're coming from. It sucks to have the #1 comic, then post a new one, and your old comic immediately gets kicked out.
Zack and I have agreed to change the Top10 rules so that comics will get kicked out after 2 days, but duplicate comics from the same site can be in the top10. I think this is better. If you have 2 funny comics, double exposure! What do you think of this? Any other ideas?
Guys this is amazing I'm glad to see everything up and running.
great job!
I think that the idea of a two-day limit with multiple entries allowed works best. At least in theory. I guess we'll see how good it works in practice.
Just found this from a link on SchlockMercenary - you've got a great idea here!
My first impressions:
• Man, it's slow! When I'm going between pages, it takes forever to load. Not that big of a deal, but something to look at going forward.
• What if it's just kinda funny? A rating system might be more helpful than just yes/no, especially for story comics. You could maybe even have a spin off for them, "IsItEntertainingToday?" maybe, since you can love a story strip even when it doesn't make you laugh.
• Any plans on tackling archives? It'd be interesting to look at the full archive of Sinfest, for instance, and compare them all or see what comes out as the funniest strip.
Whatever you end up doing, adding, changing, or whatever, you're off to a great start and I look forward to where it goes from here.
Looks great. Can't wait to see the improvements you guys make.
@momo: Yeah, we were having some speed problems earlier, but we made some changes on the server and it should be loading fine now. As far as story comics go, we're exploring new ways to make the site more fair to them, we just haven't settled on anything. And about the archives, check out the 'Comic Archives' link at the top. You can sort by comic strip name and some other things. Thanks for your opinions.
Yup, it's been a ton faster today. Nicely done.
As for the archives, I played around with it a bit. Using the Sinfest example again, it goes back to November 2 but no further. I'm talking going all the way back to Strip No. 1 back in 2000. Something to think about at least. :)
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