You Say it First: Monday - Friday, Sunday (6/week)
Spare Parts: Monday, Wednesday and Friday (3/week)
NamirDeiter.net: Tuesday, Thursday (2/week)
So, since we're not doing a bonus comic book (just the bonus comic strips), anyone who donates $50 will get one of our lovely hand-painted ND Unlimited boxes. These are one-of-a-kind items, so the first person to donate $50 and request a box gets it. If you donate and don't have a preference, we'll send you a randomly selected box at the end of the month. If more than 5 people donate $50, we'll make more. Note that the bottom-middle and bottom-right are the same box at different angles, so as to show off its art and its boxiness.
Basically, we weren't able to get any work done on Sunday, so we spend today writing comics. While both us us can write under pressure, neither of us can write fast under pressure. As such, we're getting things readied up and it's taking a bit longer than we intended.
I apologize for the general lack of advance warning, but we've been a bit distracted lately. Speaking of which, NamirDeiter.net is being moved to the new server. The coding is finished and seems like it's going to work.
SoapyLemon.com: Will probably become a mirror site.
Spare Parts: Caught up! Thank you, Isabel!.
Grover Hills: Migrated and working!
NamirDeiter.net: Tested and being migrated as we speak!.
NDUnlimited.com: I'll get to it soon, honest.
Your e-mail to me: I'm at least a week and a half behind on most everything. Moreso if it requires a detailed response. I'm very sorry and I promise I'll get back to you once everything's up and running.
The RSS feed: Not working. It's on my fix list. After that's done, I get to work on the various other minor and major enhancements I'd been planning on for the last few months.
Mirror sites: planned - more information when things are more definite.
Your patience: Greatly appreciated. Thank you, everyone, for your help and support.
Our patience: Pretty good - it looks like we're almost done with this!
At the beginning of day 3 the site was working again... things were updated, we put up panic images so if one of our hosts would do that again, we had some access to the main page even if we could not directly access it (in case we were ever "locked out again". A clever idea of Terrence's that only had one flaw:
It would only work as long as the web site that we could not edit was still up in some way.
Sometime on day 3 (I think that afternoon) our site when down totally. No comics, no access, no e-mail. That seriously screwed me up and by that time we were fed up.
By day 4 our site was up... kind of. They used back ups from April 9th (one of the "features" of our hosts was alleged daily backups... must be stored in the back with the useful tech support in the shed that no one has a key to open). That pissed us off greatly, but that wasn't the kicker in all this.
Our password no longer worked. AGAIN.
And then... by the end of day four, the site went down again. This was written at 2:30am on the 17th. There needs to be a better word for rage.
It is now day 5 - things are back up, more or less. We haven't processed new donations for a week or so, but NamirDeiter.net is back up. The explanation we got was "our DNS got Jammed with your domain", and I'm not sure if that makes any sense.
We have dealt with FuitadNet's tech support on four different occasions over those 4 days (three tickets and one live chat that didn't get us any sort of answer). In every time we used them they were completely unhelpful and would give us no information. Terrence told me that their hosting forum threads along the lines of "Don't these people realize they are running a business?" and "So what hosts are people moving to?" are popping up. When the CEO of FuitadNet DID comment on anything, it was usually very brisk, grammatically-challenged postings that didn't actually say or do anything. Notice a trend here?
FuitadNet has a tendency to melt down at least once a year... we've been with them for three years and they still can't get their act together. Needless to say, we're getting the hell out of here.
I'm sure some of you are angry as us as well- why didn't we move sooner? Why didn't we try to keep everyone informed of this?
Why didn't we move sooner?When FuitadNet was good it was very, very good- but when it crashed it did so for days. There usually were only issues that lasted an afternoon at most. This was the first time where in four days we had three different problems occur. That and moving the sites takes a lot of work- NamirDeiter.net will need to be recoded when we move, which isn't an easy task. And I like having semi-reliable e-mail.
I sent in a donation a few days ago and haven't heard back. What's up?Unfortunately, we haven't been able to process donations since this started. The server status has gone from "locked" to "down" to "restored from a month ago" to "down" and is currently back up. We haven't forgotten about you. The site just hasn't been up for more than twelve hours at a time lately. We really appreciate you sticking by us through this.
In the past, you've extended donors' accounts to make up for outages. Will you do that this time?Yes, we will. For at least as long as things are out. I'm not considering things "back up" until NamirDeiter.net is up and running on a different host (and the DNS entries are changed, and such).
Why didn't we try to keep everyone informed of this? We really did do what we could to keep you all informed... Spare Parts is on a different server. we put our other comics on there. Unfortunately, not all of you read Spare Parts (and why is that?) so about 80% of the ND readers had no place to go for news on this.
So... what are we going to do about this? Once we get settled into our new host, a mailing list will be made which will only be used in cases of emergencies (we may make a weekly "fun" newsletter, but till then there's always the RSS feed). That way those of you who care will know.
Now onto bonus books... as some of you may know I am currently two months behind on bonus books. This has been caused by a few factors. 1. Ever since Terrence's job schedule was shifted back in December, I've been stuck with 95% of the comic work, including writing. Terrence helps when he can, but his job leaves him time to work on coding for the site and not much else. That alone has left me stressed out greatly.
The other reason isn't the physical, but the mental. Sea Dreams and Elemental Story are some of my harder series to work on... they are a bit different than my other comics (although the core to these stories are the same as everything else I do: romance). The expectation from these series from the reader is also a lot higher as a result... and the fear of not living up to that makes it impossible to actually get anything done with it.
I think it's time to remove these series from the roster- if I do continue them, they will be in the basic namirdeiter.net comic directory and not the bonus books. These series will be replaced with a Namir Deiter and You Say it First series of equal length. I will have more info on this later.
Ok... I'll try and keep everyone updated; quite honestly I haven't had a good night's rest in four days- with the removal of my wisdom teeth last Thursday to these problems, I haven't gotten much restful sleep and it really has gotten to me.