Comic Rank

Sunday, 31 January 2010

The Big Move

Marvin's got a new toy

Back in the beginning we were counting the number of hits Comic Rank got by days, then by hours. Now, just 2 years down the line, we're counting hits per second. Pretty amazing stuff right there.

This kind of load just couldn't hold with our previous hosting, and this year the bulging got a bit unsightly. About 2 weeks ago we started throttling the connections to the Comic Rank buttons and bought ourselves a shiny, clean new server.

We don't like throwing money around the place but this new server comes with one all-important feature: it was ours. Out with Apache and in with a super-lightweight nginx webserver and we're instantly 40 times more efficient. It's amazing, it doesn't break 0.3% of our CPU, even at peak times.

So now we're in the waiting process again; waiting for views to flow in, waiting for readers to add up, waiting for that all important number to pat me on the back and say "s'cool".

This current move is just affecting the underbelly of Comic Rank, for now there wont be any changes on the Comic Rank site but things are in the works and this server move gives us a lot more opportunities.

Most of you will not need to do anything, everything is peachy as-is. But remember I said we're throttling the buttons? That doesn't apply to the "view.comicrank.com" buttons which are housed on our nice new server, but it does still apply to older "comicrank.com/view/" buttons! So, if you've still got old codes on your site then you should probably think about changing them. Go to your user panel on Comic Rank to get some of that lovely new server space while its still hot.

Monday, 17 August 2009

The Comic Rank Update

Now we got features!

Man, there's so many new features to list:

New site design! It's only a tweak of the old one, but we think it looks much better.
Loads of updates to the user panel, it's now a nice place to hang out instead of a dingy corner of the site.
Private listings. Don't want to bare your reader count to the entire internet? You can change your comic to private and it wont display anywhere on the site except your user panel.
Comic places. We'll talk more about these later. Now you can distinguish readers from your RSS feed, main site and mirrors of your comic on other websites.
Age Ratings. Keep them kids safe, change your comic's rating through your "Edit Comic" page.
Conversion rates. How good is your comic at turning guests into readers? Now you'll know!
Your reader history now spans 6 months, in a monthly graph. Much more useful.
Adding a new comic to Comic Rank is now instant in most cases. Awesome.

What the update means to you:
For most it is business as usual, however, for those of you who are using their ComicRank button to track the same webcomic across multiple sites listen up! You need to generate new Comic Rank codes ASAP, failure to do so will get your comic automatically suspended. To do this, edit your comic, add in the URLs that you use and then generate new button codes for each of your sites. Each site now has a different button code so make sure you put the right one on the right site.

The same goes for people who have the code in their RSS feeds. But you don't have to add any URLs in, just select RSS from the dropdown when generating your new button.

Sunday, 7 September 2008

New new design!

It lives!

As you can see our graphic design team has been hard at work creating glossy fancy images for Comic Rank to entice the masses.

No new features this time I'm afraid but do contact me with any suggestions you may have, there's always the contact form.

No Internet Explorer support yet as it is a terrible browser (and the compliant IE8 is full of bugs still), so expect ugly bits if you insist of using it. (psst, why not try out firefox instead?).

There will be some appearance tweaks over the course of the next few weeks as we perfect the design of the site but nothing major so you can get all comfortable.

Anyway, enjoy and keep all the new visitors coming in! We've topped 50 comics and are coming up to speed with over 5,000 readers being counted every day.