busybee comics

This is one of the stories that’s been pinging around in my head for a while.

I decided I didn’t like how obtrusive some of the ads were in the RSS feed, and it’s not like they were really getting me anything, so I’ve removed them. Let me know if you see anything broken etc. etc.

Although that’s only for people who are using the direct RSS feed, rather than the FeedBurner feed. I actually would prefer if everyone just moved to the direct feed (http://beesbuzz.biz/d/rss.php). I’d discontinue the FeedBurner feed except that a lot of people still use that one, and FeedBurner/Google love themselves some lock-in and make it very difficult to transition people away gracefully (since it’s not really in their best interests to lose all that potential advertising revenue from a comic that has all of 75 readers). I’ve turned down the ad obtrusiveness on FeedBurner as far as it will go but I don’t see any way to disable the ads outright anymore.

If I do end up discontinuing the FeedBurner feed I’ll be sure to let everyone know.

I’m proverbially going home for the holidays (or, literally, to my parents' house) from the 24th thru the 30th, and it’s both unlikely that I’ll have a full buffer of comics scheduled in time and likely that I’ll be unable to work on comics much while I’m there. So don’t go nuts if I fail to keep my comics updated next week.

I haven’t had time to work on comics themselves, although I did upgrade the aging Movable Type 3.36 I had before to 5.0. I don’t like the new user interface. It seems to be hyper-optimized for the sorts of things that I’ve never actually used a CMS for, and makes simple site management a pain in the butt (and also wants to manage EVERYTHING, not just the entry text). Also, it’s freaking unstable from the admin panel (update: turns out I was running out of memory, which was easy to fix by removing a couple of templates that I don’t actually use). Very annoying. I might actually just get around to writing my own dang CMS since it’s not like the upgrade has fixed the duct-tapiness of it all (although I can probably simplify my templates somewhat, at least).

Anyway, I’m heading back to San Francisco on the 30th (i.e. today) so hopefully updates will start again soon.