Hey everyone. I have a mixed plate of news. I’ll begin with some good: For the first time, this comic pushed past the 40 mark on TopWebComics.com, landing at 38 earlier this week! So a big mahalo to all of you who take the time to cast a vote!
Also in the good category (hopefully): I switched hosting companies, moving nikkisprite.com from bluehost to hostgator. I made the decision to move after I discovered that bluehost permanently banned another one of my domains, antispyguy.com. I registered that domain a few years ago to be able to share anti-spyware tips, particularly how to effectively use hijackthis to clean your computer. I never actually got around to setting the site up but I hung on to the domain. The only content on the site was a jpeg mockup I did of the homepage. There was nothing offensive or inappropriate, but Bluehost banned it without explanation or notice. After looking at Bluehost’s terms of use, I became worried that NikkiSprite.com might one day suffer the same fate. Bluehost does not permit nudity on any sites they host. Granted, Nikki is a comic, and I’m not sure whether the nudity clause would apply, but given what happened to antispyguy.com -for no good reason that I know of- I decided to be safe than sorry. So, I moved to hostgator, which permits adult content. I’m still trying to work out the glitch in the menu bar, but otherwise the move was painless. Hopefully the site will run faster and smoother. I’ve read mostly overwhelming praise for hostgator.
Now the bad: I came home on Thursday with the intention of setting up the renders for page 99. From what I can determine, while I was at work my PC became self aware, realized that it had been largely regulated to generating images for an inane, provocative online adventure comic rather than working to solve the problem of baryon asymmetry in the observable universe, and decided to end it all. Either that or evil Ashley became incarnate and sabotaged the drive before Flitter Pim could fully recharge… In any event, my C: drive lost bootmgr and would not load Windows.
My weekend was spent in PC hell, first trying to repair my Win 7 install, then trying to rescue my important documents, then trying to reformat and reinstall to the C: drive, and finally trying to install to a new 1.5TB drive that I bought a few months ago. After having no success I determined that my motherboard needs to be replaced and is causing Windows to fail. The PC was four years old so I elected to upgrade. I’m tracking down a new CPU, motherboard and ram.
Fortunately, the 3D objects and 2D images that I use to create this comic are on other drives, so my data should be fine. But those are sata drives, and I don’t have a sata-to-usb external housing that will enable me to connect them to my laptop and continue working while I rebuild my main PC. Add to this mess the fact that I will be out of town for 3 days in the coming week, and the result is that there will probably not be any update for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that!
In the meantime: any suggestions for a special image to celebrate page 100?
Cheers -TK
As NikkiSprite.com nears the 100th comic milestone, I would like to take a moment to share some assorted Nikki news:
First of all, I want to thank everyone for your continued support of this comic. Most referral traffic to Nikki Sprite comes from TopWebComics.com, the undisputed king of webcomic lists. There are over 15,000 online comics, of which TWC.com ranks the top 2500. Nikki consistently places around 45, and recently has flirted with breaking through the 40s. So I appreciate all of your votes 🙂
Also, I don’t think I ever previously mentioned that ugo.com voted Nikki Sprite as one of the 10 sexiest comics on the internet. Check out the listing here!
Now some bad news: I’m currently working to upgrade my version of ComicPress. This is not an easy or painless process. It may result in some short outages in the weeks ahead, since the upgrade requires the custom css to be redone.
Last but certainly not least, I want to give a big shout out to André J. André is a French reader/fan who not only made a monetary donation this month, but has also offered to translate Nikki into French and Spanish! How cool is that?! Once my ComicPress upgrade is complete, I’ll begin working to offer Nikki in French and Spanish -with André’s generous help.
Cheers -TK
I’m traveling for two weeks -business, not pleasure 🙁 . Sorry, but I haven’t been able to finish this week’s update. I’ll see you next week. In the meantime, check out the new pics in the BFF Mini Gallery. Cheers -TK
Sorry friends, but I’m a tad late on today’s update -mainly caused by some very uncooperative parts of Talona’s clothes (yes, Talona at last is introduced to the comic). As a result of the wardrobe malfunctions, I’ve had to change Talona’s arm band and leg band and then re-render the frames. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish by the end of day Thursday -if not, soon thereafter. Thanks for your patience and support! -TK
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