I am so sorry about this one, guys…. I had a bit of a minor wake-up call today and realized that an update I’d meant to post here never made it to the front page of the site. I’ve made noise about it a few times, but this year’s definitely proven to be one where I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. A comic buffer was built, a comic buffer disappeared under weeks of spontaneous stress, a comic buffer was built again and that comic buffer is kinda barely being maintained now. I keep on thinking I’ve got it, I’ve got it, but it’s still pretty hard to keep one step ahead. Some of that’s because of time, some of its because of stress. When I started this comic I was working 24 hours a week, max, at a fairly easy low-paying job and taking care of pretty much just myself. I’m currently in a job that takes up more than 40 hours a week, involves a longer commute, and stresses me out enough that I take it home with me, which affects my productivity in nasty ways, plus I have a proper home and family in the mix now and that adds a lot of new factors.
What this comes down to is that contrary to my optimism in the earlier part of the year, I haven’t actually been able to fix the problems with the site. In truth, I’ve discovered over the months that there’s more subtly wrong with this website than I’d previously anticipated. I did spend a while after the last post trying to fix things that were broken and that I thought would be easy to fix or change so that they’d work well instead of badly, failed on all counts, kept trying, and then my job-related life did that thing where it spontaneously spun into chaos, I lost track of time in a ridiculous way, and here we are still on a slow site where a lot of basic functions are kind of not-worky or partly not-worky and not as simple to repair as I’d originally thought they were. But I should have said something sooner.
I can’t make any promises because ultimately I have a feeling this might be a rebuild-from-scratch kind of issue. I mean, part of my dashboard is broken back here and I don’t even know how that could have gotten borked. And there’s a lot more, and it’s honestly been happening over a course of years in little bits of bad code accumulation. I’ve got a bit of time coming up next month and I can give fixing it a shot then. Hopefully it won’t involve a complete rebuild, and instead just a partial one, and I can get it done and back on track.
Again, I apologize profusely for how long in coming this explanation of my silence and the numerous site hiccups has been. This was the most tardy post I’ve ever made on an issue that’s probably driving more of you mad than just the one who finally brought it to my attention. I’ll try my best to make it better.