A Year In

Today marks one year since the first Webcomics Worth Wreading entry went up. Let's take a look at the first year of this blog's existence.

Featured Webcomics: 37

If I'd kept up with the weekly schedule I started with, that number would've been 52. But real life showed up and I missed a week here and there before switching to a biweekly schedule. I'm using biweekly to mean "every other week" instead of "twice a week." I hope that was clear.

Doing this every other week has been much more manageable, although I did wind up skipping one of the dates when I would have otherwise posted, even by this more lenient schedule. But I used that time well, and even spent some of it reading comics that I hadn't dived into previously. March was an awfully full month for me, and I'm glad some of it was filled with reading. The future of this blog depends on me continuing to expand my reference base.

Books I've been quoted on: 1

Spacetrawler has now concluded, and the third and final volume has been printed. There is a quote from my entry about Spacetrawler on the back of the book. I'm pretty happy about that.

Most popular blog entry: Oglaf (Be warned that that particular entry is NSFW.)

The majority of traffic this blog gets is from people looking for Oglaf. (Since the entry on this blog regarding that comic is NSFW, it's a fair bet that the comic itself is NSFW also, but I figure I'll state it outright just in case.) The Oglaf entry hasn't quite been viewed more times than every other entry on this blog combined, but it has been viewed an awful lot.

I guess the lesson here is that people on the Internet like porn, which is not actually all that surprising.

Webcomics that have been recommended to me since I started: Loads.

Starting years ago, I started bookmarking webcomics that people had recommended, on Twitter or on their own websites or wherever. Sometimes I would read one of these comics immediately, but sometimes I didn't have the time, or I wasn't in the mood to explore something new, and I would bookmark it. I now have a massive bookmark folder full of recommendations. They've been accumulating for a long time!

Ideally, I would read these comics at some sort of steady rate, but I haven't developed any sort of system to go through them all, so I get around to them haphazardly and unreliably. And after I started doing this blog, people started telling me about lots and lots of different webcomics that they think I should look at.

I don't want to discourage recommendations. I like hearing about new webcomics. I like reading new webcomics. I will cheerfully add new bookmarks to my already-huge folder of webcomics that I haven't yet read but that I want to try. But I might not get around to reading new recommendations for a while.

That reading I did in March? Part of that time was spent digging into that oversized bookmarks folder. I actually made a dent in it. I'm pretty happy about that.

Amount of frustration I've had with Blogger's formatting capabilities: SO MUCH

When I launched Webcomics Worth Wreading I didn't know very much about Blogger. I was learning as I went. One of the things I learned early on is that placing images where I want them to be in blog posts and making sure they're the size I want them to be is somewhat tricky. Even trickier, though, is trying to convince Blogger to insert the correct number of line breaks in my post. I don't know why, but fairly often when I hit preview there are a bunch of extra line breaks. It takes some time to wrangle each post into looking roughly the way I want it to.

Then, there are instances where some paragraphs are clearly single-spaced and others use 1.5 spacing and I can't tell what's different about them that makes the spacing change between paragraphs. It's a mystery to me.

Honestly, there are lots of small formatting adjustments that I would love to make to this blog, but after all the big formatting adjustments I have to do for each post, I never have the energy.

People I have to thank: SO MANY

All of the creators whose comics I have written about. The people who've commented on this blog, or to me on Twitter. Gary Tyrell of Fleen for being an early supporter. Scott McCloud for basically teaching me that comics are a thing and for creating or introducing me to the first webcomics that I read. People who've provided me encouragement in real life.

All of you have helped me to keep this blog going. I've enjoyed writing it for the past year, and I hope you've enjoyed reading it, too.

The future: Bright

There are still lots of webcomics that I'm eager to write about. I should definitely be able to keep this blog going for another year. And, if people keep creating new things and I keep reading them, then theoretically I should be able to keep this blog going indefinitely.

Until such a time as indefinitely comes, I'll be here.

Thanks for letting me talk at you. There'll be a proper entry up next Tuesday.