Finally, back from PhreakNIC! (Also, the complete #104...)

Just in case nobody believed me when I said I did the shirts. :-p

Apologies for the "incompleteness" of #104... apparently the internet connection at the convention, in addition to being a source of much pwnage, was going down more than a... well, let's just say I'm happy the amount that DID get through included enough content that you were still able to enjoy it. Either way, I've fixed it and provided an intact version of #104.

(I'm also going to have to remind myself that no matter how urban the location, how connected to the internet I am, or how smart the hackers I'm with are, to either upload the page BEFORE leaving town or else finally figure out how to automate updates. It ain't worth the headache otherwise.)

As always, if you love what you see, go ahead and leave a comment on the forums or right here.

Convention Alert: PhreakNIC is October 24-25!

There's one more convention to hit for this year: PhreakNIC's up in Nashville this weekend, and things are... a little different this time around.

Namely, guess whose art made the convention shirts?

Sorry I couldn't tell you folks sooner (well, unless you already caught wind of it on Twitter or otherwise), but it'll be hard to keep under wraps after this weekend for obvious reasons. I expect things to be low-key (since it's a small convention), but safe to say I'm thrilled.

... And yes, there shouldn't be any delays in the comic as a result. It's a hacker convention after all; I'll find an internet connection somewhere, I'm sure.

Morning Coffee Returns! Webcomic Fans Rejoice!

For everyone who got themselves all wrapped up in Download Day 2008 and found themselves without their daily dose of Morning Coffee... good news! It's back again, and is now compatible with Firefox 3!

What the heck is Morning Coffee? It's the most awesome Firefox Add-on that you can think of for webcomics! Once you have all your comics listed within the extension, just one click of the coffee cup gets you all the comics you want to read that day!

Out of sheer joy for the new update of Morning Coffee, I've made a great how-to lens about it. It'll walk you through all the steps of how to install and set up your new extension so you never have to worry about missing webcomic updates again! I even did some screenshots for it so you know exactly what you're looking for.

If you've not heard of Morning Coffee before or tried it out, this is a great way to learn about it. Check it out!

See How Easily You Can Get a Response out of People: Skribit Shows you How!

Wouldn't you just love it if people TOLD you what they wanted?

Okay, we get it. Forums require registration. Emails require firing up whatever program or website you use for emailing. Telling someone in person requires . . . well, being in person. Even commenting on a blog requires providing some personal information, going past a captcha, and who knows what else. When you don't feel like doing all of that, these are nothing more than communication hurdles.

Skribit takes a Howitzer to those hurdles.

Skribit is the little-known brainchild of Startup Weekend Atlanta (with people like Paul Stamatiou behind the wheel), and is a blog widget that sits in your sidebar. You can see mine if you look down and to the right a bit — assuming you're actually on the blog's page, of course.

What is it: It's a pain-free way for readers (like you) to suggest new topics for this blog. It supports anonymous posting, so no account is necessary, and once a topic is in there, other people can vote to support it. The more support something has, the more I know people want to see that topic. We're not talking excessively detailed suggestions though - a quick phrase or two is enough.

Why you need it: If people don't see a topic they like on your blog (or have a slightly different one in mind), they can suggest it for future discussion later. It's a great way to "read the reader's minds" and get a pulse for what people are really coming to hear. From a webcomic perspective, you can use it to suggest new gag-a-day's or get a feel for what readers want to see next!

How to use it:

• Click on "Click here to suggest a topic" to give a brief idea of what you want, and a 140-characters-or-less description of what it is.
  
• Click on an already-suggested topic to see more information about that topic.
  (it takes you away from the current page though...)
  
• Click on "Vote" if you like what you see.

You don't need to be registered with Skribit (though we dare say it helps).

How to get it: Go register over on Skribit, give them a little info about your blog, and plug the widget in, then wait to see what others suggest.

Who Else Wants Awesome Readership Statstics? (Hint: It involves Google!)

My Dad influences me than I care to admit. Even when it comes to Last Resort, he ended up getting me to try out blogging on the comic, and so it's no surprise that I'm also trying out Google Analytics now (after much insistance) as well. Granted, I only did it after I decided the stats I was receiving from Xepher already weren't 'good enough', but...

What It Is: Stat tracking. Keeps up with visitors, pageviews, bounce rate (how many people only look at the first page), time spent on the site, where they come from (but not where they go), etc. Try different things on your page to tweak the numbers, and track stuff going on. Did I mention it's a free Google product?

Why You Care: Why DON'T you care? Starting a comic means finding some way to get readers, and this allows you to not only keep track of who visits, but where they go, what they see, how they get there, and (possibly most importantly) when they leave. Granted, certain 'goals' may not be as useful for someone doing comics as it is for a normal online business, but if and when you realize certain pages are bringing in the traffic over others, you take notice.

How It Works: Set up an Analytics account under your normal Google account. Add in a little javascript cookie to the bottom of all the pages on your site (if you're smart and coded in php like a good Lazy Hacker, this should only involve adding it to the footer file). Wait a day or two for your first results. Tweak accordingly.

My Attempts: Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to give a full analysis of the 'benefits' of this until I complete the first comic cycle in a week (in order to give the whole "70% new vistors" thing to calm down a bit) , so I can only glean out bits and pieces of information from working this so far.

• I've got a frickin' high bounce rate. Granted, it's a comic on a page with very little other additional information, so either a lot of people are turning away from the comic on the first go, or there's a lot of people who just read it and then go on.
  
  • My exit rate on the first comic ain't that great either. Probably as time goes on, I'll need to include some more information on it, like commentary and stuff.
    
• I have some . . . interesting results from being able to get more information from referrals than just who came from where. I'm not surprised that I had several other xepher.net sites referring to me; that's just the newsbox. That DeviantArt still brings in good traffic is surprising (considering that I thought nobody went to that account).
  
  • According to the pages-per-visit information, I seem to get 'better' traffic from it too (as opposed to the Belfry, which brings in a lot of traffic, but not much that sticks around for very long) The obvious drawback is that it's all from spots that don't bring in 'much' traffic individually.
    
• A lot of the more 'interesting' search strings have disappeared now; I suspect it's from moving the blog to different hosting. I've started a secondary profile for it, so the results from that should come in soon.
  
• Lots of people are still using lastresort.xepher.net instead of www.lastres0rt.com. And that includes direct traffic.
  
• Whichever one of you came here using their Nintendo Wii: You cracked me up when I saw that stat. You rock!
  

I've not watched the tutorials, gone through the FAQ or anything else at this point, so there're probably a few more tricks up its sleeve, but so far I can already see that Google Analytics is a vast improvement over my previous statistics system; the bounce/exit rate data alone is enough to spur some change. It may seem silly to care 'this' much about your statistics, but if you're gonna try and make changes to your site anyway, why not have a reliable system that can provide tons of depth about your site?

Page 27: Oh, the Irony in this Page.

The irony, of course, is in (temporarily) letting my Dad handle updates.

Okay, in fairness, as much as I represent myself through Jigsaw as a 'fursona' or avatar or whatever the hip new word is, Cypress is the one modeled off me more in terms of my personality. That said, I sorta see the relationship between Cypress and Vince as being two parts what I'm like with my Dad, and one part what the McMahons must feel like.

That sums up this current storyline, and next week I'll need to entrust my Dad with the next part... which we can only hope goes up without a hitch. No, he won't be updating the blog, but seeing how I'm having to dumb down the update process for him as is, that may be a minor blessing. Attempting to teach him went something like this:

"Okay, so we open these php files in notepad -- you'll need to tell the file viewer to show you 'all files', 'cause it treats php files weird for some reason -- and edit here, here, and here, and then you open winSCP, go to this directory-."

"... can you just put some premade files in a special directory so I can just go to that week and upload it instead?"

. . . I know my Dad's supersmart and everything, but really, when it comes to interfaces, you guys are spoiled rotten. Spoiled, I tell you.

Standing Out by Blending In

This ties back to the Lazy Hacker approach: looking for a method of 'least resistance' in order to get exactly what you want. Fortunately, the Lazy Hacker approach also lends itself to a great trick when it comes to getting noticed; by only altering the cosmetic elements of what's involved, viewers get a whole new experience even if it's the exact same everything else under the hood.

To wit: This blog is being created thanks to Blogger, and as such I grabbed one of the first templates I could think of. Actually, I ended up grabbing 'Rounders' instead because it was more grok-able than the first one I picked up.

I shouldn't have to go too far in explaining why this simply wasn't good enough for my tastes. It's a perfectly fine layout, yes, and it has nice rounded edges, which looks better than sharp corners. But the colors are all wrong (despite the header being a nice red), and if I wanted to change any of the colors, I couldn't deviate far from the presets without the corner images themselves clashing. Furthermore . . . it looked obvious it was a Blogger page. Regardless of what my readers might 'think of me' for using it, leaving it in a default setting didn't make any sense at all when it was completely different from my comic site's layout. If nothing else, it had to look like the two pages went together.

To Fix: One of the few saving graces of the fact I'd picked up an otherwise unsuitable template was that (as I mentioned) the code was quite clean in comparison to some of the other templates, and I had a general idea that the main fixes I needed to do were mostly image-based; in other words, I needed to find the image URL references in the template given, and replace them with a few of my own. To keep the amount of necessary work to a minimum, I would often reference the template images given to make sure I was on the right track with sizes and general image/page anatomy involved.

The main issue with this approach was that the template was designed to work with the specific images it had, and so where mine deviated, I had to adjust the code to make them fit. Typically this involved altering the 'padding' of the given sections and constantly hitting the 'Preview' button on the template each time I made even minor changes to see what effect I had. Obsessive, perhaps, but it worked.

Wherever something didn't fit in with the new scheme, it was "commented out" of the HTML coding, just in case I realized I wanted it for later (which is where that ugly text that was replaced by the new banner image went) . For the most part though, the actual layout of the page went untouched — the profile box barely looks different at all, although that's more by coincidence than anything else. The color DID change slightly to match the banner's edge, but that's about it.

The end goal was achieved in only a few hours' time though: We've broken free of the Blogger default, and made it look like it actually belongs to the domain. We even managed to use the favicon to replace the arrows in the bullets, adding to the design reinforcement. It's not a completed change-over, but it's sufficient enough that it's worth leaving it alone for now to see how well it actually works.

Interested in a similar redesign? Email me and we'll see if we can't arrange (or rearrange, as the case may be) something... or just subscribe to the RSS feed and stay tuned.

Five Secrets of the Lazy Hacker

Most of us know what a hacker 'is', or at least think we do; the image of some sweaty nerd who is anything but a healthy weight banging away at the keyboard and doing God-knows-what to our computers. Really, it's just someone who is so damned determined to get Result A that they're willing to do Task B, even if it means voiding a warranty or rooting around in the binaries to find out how to do it. Since at least some of making a webcomic means controlling the webpage it's viewed on, learning to be a Lazy Hacker can be quite useful:

Lazy Hacker Secret #1: Never code for yourself what someone else has already put out on the Internet.
We don't mean theft, either. If you want to find a way to put Twitter into an image so you can have it in your forum sigs, guess what: Someone at TwitterSig already did it for you, albeit you might not like the image. Likewise, using templates for MySpace, Blogger, and other paste-and-bakes is already quite possible, and so it shouldn't be an issue to find one (or better yet, find one you can customize).

If you can only find close-but-not-quite what you want...

Lazy Hacker Secret #2: Grok the Code that's already There.
You should know what clean, commented-out code looks like when you see it, because it actually makes SENSE to read it. If you're not working from code that's already pristine, make it pristine. Tabbing-in nested portions and spacing out your work isn't just nice to read, it's essential to learning anything. Lazy Coders don't make their code easy to read because they don't want you to read it, so it'll be up to you to figure out how to clean it up.

Of course, sometimes you just don't want to read about that damned stylesheet any more than you have to, so...

Lazy Hacker Secret #3: Compartmentalize Repeated Code.
You'll need to learn some php, but we're talking very minimal php, and this is talking about actually coding stuff. A fun thing to understand about PHP is that it not only allows for code execution, but it also allows for object-oriented coding, even when all you're doing is regurgitating HTML. Between the choice of designing a header that has to be copy-pasted across umpteen pages versus telling each page to retrieve from "header.php", and then only having to change one file versus umpteen whenever you want to create a change . . . well, that's not just Lazy, that's downright clever.

But now we've just asked you to learn a little trick to make your life easier! That's okay, because since you're trying to be Lazy, obviously you should...

Lazy Hacker Secret #4: Only Learn What You Need Right Then.
Just because it's not the way you were taught in school doesn't mean it still won't work. When it comes to HTML, CSS, PHP, and all the other Alphabet-soup languages, you should only seek out the parts that get the job done; you'll understand those bits easier, and even if it doesn't make sense, at least you know what works. Language references are just littered across the internet, and picking up the few bits you need from each one should be easy, right?

Once you've done this much legwork, and you're still stumped, it's time to use the last Tip...

Lazy Hacker Secret #5: Know Who to Ask.
When it comes to simple HTML questions, it makes sense to ask your peers first. If you feel you need more advice, forums for programmers and books on the stuff are meant to be used. As long as you sound like you've done at least a little research, most geeks will gladly either give you the next few steps, or soundly correct you (but give you the right answer anyway).

Caveat: Make sure the question is worth their time. You don't ask Linus Torvalds what the 'ls' command is, and trying to jump the hierarchy of expertise makes you look dumber for asking and also makes it less likely others will answer.

A little effort goes a long way with a Lazy Hacker, and while it won't make you a complete programming guru, at least it'll be enough to make what you've got look worthwhile.