Archive for October, 2013


The life of a comic author

October 1st, 2013

Katie Tiedrich of Awkward Zombie nails one of the worst parts of being a comic artist/writer apart from having to deal with webserver failures:

Let's draw a comic

But I think even worse than the pictured example or a just plain wrong “correction”, is a correction which might be 5% more accurate, but which would also completely ruin the joke. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of our readers are as rude as StrawGuy2009 when they complain about something in the comment section.

PS: Tom Nook & Co. are raccoon dogs, not raccoons! So Katie should have called them “raccoon dog guys”! I wish the author of these comics actually knew what she was talking about or cared about zoology!

“6 Comments”

[0516] All-Consuming Love

[0516] All-Consuming Love

October 3rd, 2013

[0517] Heartbreakers

[0517] Heartbreakers

October 7th, 2013

[0518] Ten Laps

[0518] Ten Laps

October 10th, 2013

Cause for webserver problems found

October 11th, 2013

After two weeks without problems, I’m now confident that I have found and fixed the cause for the webserver problems on 25 and 26 September.

Two security plugins for WordPress were the offenders, “Acunetix WP Security” and “Ultimate Security Checker”. After the last update, the first one began to carelessly make many long-running database queries. Meanwhile, the second one had inflated WordPress’ crucial wp_options table over the course of time. I guess a webserver which is no longer online after a database crash is kind of secure…

This shows that some functionality that might be beneficial for a website with 1000 page views per day can be disastrous for a website with 100,000. Apart from deleting the two plugins, I worked on the website backend during the last two weeks to further increase its performance.

“9 Comments”