New Wax Turds design – XMAS XMAS XMAS

Yep, ’tis the season.

Hey lookie, a new site design.

I took down the admittedly awesome Halloween skin for my comic site and decided to actually change more than just the banner and the background back to “normal”. So, bam.

I mostly wanted to start getting away from the mustard orange/yellow color I had previously. I really like that color, but I’m starting to get sick of it. So behold, lighter yellow. I’m toying with some totally new colors, and even some new layouts, but that is a major overhaul and I’m not sure I want to do that just yet. Maybe next year?

New site skin for Halloween

I was a tad bored yesterday, so I decided to give my comic site a new color scheme. Check it out!

Some more bits of tid

I finally finished transcribing all my comics into ohnorobot. I only had a hundred-ish to do, but man it took a long time. I changed the default search engine thing on my site to the ohnorobot one, so now you can search for stuff pretty darn efficiently on WT! Good times!

Speaking of Wax Turds, the site has seen a surge of viewers recently, for reasons I can’t really pin down. My top guess is “awesomeness”, but it could very well be “radness”. Not sure, but either way it’s sweet.

Also, I made a new masthead for the site:

Las night I went to the Dodgers game with some duders, and got to sit in the all-you-can-eat section. Of course, as lady luck would have it, I really wasn’t super hungry, so I only had a couple of hot dogs and a soda. I don’t think I’ll be in the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest anytime soon..

All you can eat + pretty good seats = good times

I picked up Shadow Complex on Xbox live arcade, and let me tell you: that game is awesome. It’s definitely a throw-back to Metroid like it’s being billed as, but more importantly it’s just friggin fun. This whole “summer of arcade” thing xbox is pushing is pretty damn legit. Viva la side scrollers!

It's rad, guys. Go buy it.

I decided to make a facebook page for Wax Turds! Except, it turns out the word “turd” is frowned upon by facebook, so I had to make the page called “WaxTurds”. Lame! Anyway, it’s there.

I’ve decided to try OhNoRobot

In case you don’t know, I run a little webcomic called Wax Turds. Sure, it might look like things are all shits and  giggles (ha!) on the site, but I’ve had one major pain in my ass since starting my site: the search function. Frankly, it’s just not cutting it, because it’s made for more text-heavy blog posts. Since everything I post is an image, there is not really a great way to index all my comics so the search will actually find what you’re looking for.

Well, I was poking around on Dinosaur Comics today and I came across something the dude that makes those fantastic comics came up with: OhnoRobot. Apparently it’s a pretty rad search feature made specifically for webcomics. Well, I thought to myself, that’s exactly what I need, by golly.

Not only does it seem to be just what the doctor ordered, it’s also got a pretty damn rad logo. My friend type people know I’m a fan of the robits, but I’m super fan of robit birds. Also, I really like to say robit instead of robot. I heard them say that on the original Twilight Zone a bunch and it’s just always stuck with  me, I guess.

So anyway, I’m currently transcribing all my comics so they are searchable via ohnorobot, then I’ll try to integrate that into my site in some kind of intelligent way. Here’s a little taste of things to come!

Check out the new WT shirt

A few weeks ago me and the buds were making some more shirts, and they turned out pretty good! I don’t have pics of the other ones, just the one I wore. 

Check it out!

Hallucigenia is one of my favorite Cambrian fossils, so naturally it should be on a shirt!

Website madness!

So, I bought another website domain. Well actually I did it about a week ago, but I haven’t really told many people about it. 

Basically my friend and I wanted a place to show off things we think are, well, rad. As of now there really isn’t much up, I’m still learning how to do some stuff on the backend (heh) of the site before going too crazy with content. Eventually I want to have the ability for users to upload rad things (images, video, sound, thoughts) to the website, and other users can rate and comment on it. Of course, setting up that kind of site takes a little technical know-how, which I have a moderate amount of, but not quite enough as of yet.

Of course, there is also my burgening web comic, Wax Turds.

It’s actually doing pretty alright! I’m getting a healthy stream of visitors, some of which are people who know me personally, and some of which are apparently strangers who have stumbled upon my dark corner of the internet. So that’s awesome! 

I’m currently popping out 3-5 comics per week, largely dependent on how much free time I have at work. Lately I’ve been trying to optimize the site for search engines, which is a little more involved than it used to be back when I made websites in the late 90′s/early 00′s. Oh meta tags, how I miss your importance. If nothing else, doing these new sites has given me more of an appreciation for how awesome google actually is. They provide a ton of cool tools to analyze site usage and manage how your website shows up in search engines, so they get a little tip of the hat from yours truely.

Well that’s about it for my websites…I suppose that means it’s the end of website madness blog.

Also, boobs.

Yeah, we made some t-shirts.

El animal and I made t-shirts sporting the badarse Wax Turds logo (which el animal created). So yeah, we’re pretty awesome and sexy now.

I’m sporting the green one, pink ain’t my thang so much. That was a special one for V-day, naturally.

If  you’re super nice to me, it is not outside the realm of possibility that you could get a cool shirt…