META: "This comic is currently unavailable"

Dammit gocomics and Google.




Concerning gocomics:

It seems that a number of strips, including the ones I was just coming up on, currently display graphics stating "This comic is currently unavailable check back soon."  At this time this includes comics for Fabruary 9-12, 1954, as well as the 14th, the 18th, the 20th and the 22nd.  There may be others too.


In fact, the paragraph I just gave you us slightly out of date.  That was yesterday, which I couldn't post because Blogger was down.  Now the strips in question don't even show the error image.  Just navigation elements.  See for yourself.

I think I know why.  When I was looking through these strips before, I noticed that a few of them had been poorly cropped.  Specifically, there were three or four strips in the same image,  I seem to remember noticing they were like that back at comics.com.

I was all set to remark upon the problem when I got up to it, but what do you know, they seem to have found it just about the moment I got up to them.  I wonder if anyone at Universal reads this blog?  A pleasing, and yet unsettling, thought.

I'm going to hold off on discussing those strips to see how quickly gocomics fixes the problem.  (I could get them from Other Sources, but let's give them a week to fix it themselves, it's not like it should be a particularly hard thing to correct.)  There are some interesting strips affected so I'm loathe to skip them for long.

Concerning Blogger:

You'd think that Google themselves would know something about site reliability, but geez.  Blogger was down all of yesterday, and there was a worry that some posts would be lost.  That doesn't seem to have happened, at least in my case, but the outtage is the reason there was no post yesterday.

META: Uh-oh

"Peanuts no longer appears on Comics.com."

This is a problem guys. Not only does it mean I can't use my normal procedure to update the blog while in-lining strips, it also means there is a chance that all the links on the previous strips are going to suddenly break again like they did some time back. At over 700 strips up now, that would be a large amount of time to fix, even if I could find a drop-in replacement for the links. I don't know if my mad Python skillz could fix such a problem again, and even if it did all the "funny/cool/depressing/weird/etc." votes that have accumulated since the last time this happened would get reset again too. (That's a fairly minor thing, true, but I pay attention to those.)

I am quite peeved at comics.com now. To think they had finally gotten that loathsome "TV Pigs" link off of every damn page on the entire site, then they do this. I can only assume they lost the rights to Peanuts, but a little advance warning wouldn't have hurt.

Peanuts seems to be hosted at gocomics.com now, and I don't yet see in-lining instructions. I'll keep you posted as to what this means for the blog.