There are only three days left to pledge for the Kickstarter project for the comic book titled “Santa vs. Dracula” by Ed Power and Melissa DeJesus, the former creators of the entertaining newspaper comic strip My Cage. Unfortunately, their project is only 77% funded at the moment and Kickstarter requires that every project is 100% funded or they don’t collect the raised money.

Note that it’s not just an altruistic donation, you actually get something in return, for example a copy of the comic book including a sketch if you pledge $35 (like I did myself). I think giving some money to indy comic creators whose comic is not just yet another superhero comic is always a good thing to do. So I want to thank all of our readers who already supported Ed and Melissa when I first posted about “Santa vs. Dracula” a month ago in the description of our comic [0321] Children.

Update: The project is now 100% funded, just a couple of hours before the deadline!

Gaia will be released on Monday, 28 November 2011, so it’s the right time for another chat with Novil and Powree. The chat is scheduled for Saturday/Sunday, 3/4 December 2011. This time we want to talk mostly about Gaia, but of course you can also ask questions about Sandra and Woo.

Chat time on Saturday/Sunday, 3/4 December 2011:

• US Pacific Time: 17:00 (5:00 p.m.) – Saturday
• US Eastern Time: 20:00 (8:00 p.m.) – Saturday
• Greenwich Mean Time: 1:00 (1:00 a.m.) – Sunday
• Central European Time: 2:00 (2:00 a.m.) – Sunday
• Western Indonesian Time: 8:00 (8:00 a.m.) – Sunday
• Australian Eastern Time: 12:00 (12:00 a.m.) – Sunday
• more countries

Our Flash based chat can be found at: http://www.sandraandwoo.com/misc/chat.html

I posted a news entry with the same title on 23 March 2010, but since we got a lot of new readers since then, I just want to recap everything since it’s very important to us (including some updated information):

Without the ads on the website, Sandra and Woo would very likely no longer exist. The revenue is mainly used to pay Powree and Lisa for drawing and coloring the strips and to pay for the advertising for Sandra and Woo on other webcomic websites. It would be hard to justify all the time that’s invested in Sandra and Woo (and soon Gaia) if our comic would reach only a fraction of its current audience.

Therefore I’m happy that only a small minority of our visitors block the ads on our website with an ad blocker. Not blocking the ads and checking them out once in a while is the simplest method of supporting us financially!

That said I want to talk a bit how advertising on mid-sized websites like ours works since most normal internet users certainly don’t have much knowledge about it:

There are four advertising slots on our website: the leaderboard at the top, the two skyscrapers on the left and the right sidebar and the rectangle above the comment section. To get banners for such ad slots, you have to apply with your website at an internet ad agency. Google AdSense is open for practically every website, but they also only pay per click as opposed to per page view which is more profitable in most cases. Therefore it’s a good idea to apply at other ad agencies as well, but most of them have more or less strict requirements regarding the content of the website, the number of visitors and the placement of the banners on the website.

A key feature of most general purpose ad agencies is that they offer an option in their administration panel to specify what to do with the ad slot when they are unable to deliver a banner for it, for example because the visitor is from Russia and none of their advertisers is interested in serving ads to Russian visitors. Therefore you place the ad agency that pays the most on the first position of your ad chain and the others in a chain after it. The fill rate of an ad agency is depending on various factors such as their place in the ad chain since the “best” visitors are already taken by the ad agency in the first place.

Our four ad chains, which are 3 entries long, consist of the following ad agencies: ContextWeb, SayMedia, Lijit and Technorati Media.

We could also deliver ads from the following ad agencies, but they pay less or their fill rate is just too low: Burst Media, ValueClick, BannerConnect, Project Wonderful and Google AdSense.

In 2009, there were severe problems with obnoxious ads for teeth whitening products and other scams that appeared all over the internet. After the user backlash, most ad agencies now take greater care to only deliver ads for legit products and services. Nonetheless I still use the possibility to filter ads by category if the specific ad agency offers such an option in its administration panel.

According to the latest issue (December 2011) of the Popular Science magazine, the FARO Focus 3D laser scanner is as cool as a massacre-proof chainsaw. Well, at least both of them are featured prominently on the cover as one of the 100 best innovations of the year:

Since January I work as a software developer for the research department that developed the Focus 3D laser scanner. In essence, the Focus 3D laser scanner creates panoramic photographs of the environment that contain depth information so that you can measure distances or create point clouds that represent the environment.

I myself am mainly working on the Flash software SCENE WebShare which displays the panorama images, which were previously created with our main application SCENE, inside a web browser. With the help of some colleagues, I implemented several new features this year, the most important of them is certainly the measurement functionality which is now also available in WebShare. Here you can see a screenshot of the program:

You can even try it yourself on FARO’s official WebShare server. However, WebShare is meant for the intranet of companies since it has a very high CPU and memory consumption, so I can just hope that this link from Sandra and Woo does not result in a server crash because too many users want to use the program at the same time.

The Indonesian artist Archie the Redcat (DeviantArt gallery) drew the following fanart of Sandra and Woo. Thank you for the great drawing! Click on the picture for a larger version.