Two years ago, I was putting out five strips a week including three of the HB Comic-Blog, a page of Smithson (More Fun) and a page of Journey Into History: Isle of Demons. Then I went back to teaching, and in two years have produced MUCH less. One of the big stumbling blocks was my commenting system on the HB Comic-Blog. I have always viewed the blog and comments as a vital part of that strip, but technology conspired to keep them apart.

In 2005, the development team at Mambo, the open source content management system running my old site, left the project in a dispute over keeping the technology truly open-source. The new CMS, Joomla, was mostly better and mostly compatible, but the extension storing the hundreds of comments was not. I spent hours fiddling with the extension to finally get it to work. Then the development team at Joomla found a couple of major security flaws in their software. Of course the upgrade meant the commenting system broke yet again. Worse, the author of the commenting extension was nowhere to be found. I did some rewriting with the help of a couple of people going through the same difficulties.

There were three more rounds of this mess over the course of two years. In the end, I was left with a database dump file containing my content, another with the comments, and a collection of 120-plus jpegs of strips and a site that needed all of it plugged back together. The plugging it all back together was made difficult by further security upgrades, a php upgrade, a MySQL upgrade, and finally a change in character set that left me with lots of odd characters sprinkled about both content and comments.

None of this is all that complicated to deal with, but it is time-consuming. Because my strip has never really paid any bills, it had to be left for last, behind teaching, grading and all the other detritus of life. Well, this afternoon, I dove into the last piece of the puzzle and managed to get the comments linked back up with the correct strip and blog-entry. I was surprised that it really does feel much more complete as a strip with the comments back in the fray. I now understand they are what makes the strip worthwhile.

And looking to the future, I’ve moved everything over to Joey Manley’s Webcomicsnation. Joey has a pretty good track record in dealing with web-comic data. I trusted him back in 2001 as an early subscriber to moderntales.com, and a couple years later as an artist on graphicsmash.com. I think we only had one serious crash, and that was early on. Maybe now, I can give a little more focus to creating comics. Comic creators shouldn't have to dig through the kind of mess I had to deal with. I still love working with Joomla, but I've learned lots of important lessons about working with third party extensions. In the end, anything that gets me back to creating comics is worth it.

I guess that means I’m opening the door for submissions again though I won’t promise to review everything sumbitted. I also won’t promise three strips a week, but for now at least one. If you'd like some slap-dash feedback from me and the boys on your creation, send me a link and description.

So has anyone else had these kinds of troubles? I think the answer's probably lots of yes.

-Bob Stevenson