The Ephemerist

You will have noticed that some things are changing here at the Ephemerist. We recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5 (much to our delight, I must say), and we are currently changing the way we add metadata to the blog’s posts.

Up till now, we used a quite cumbersome list of categories. That was less than ideal for two reasons. Firstly, it lead to an ever expanding list of categories with only one or two entries, making the pageload heavier and heavier. Secondly, it caused recurring pondering about which category to choose. Since 2.5 offers the possibility to use tags as well as categories, we are currently limiting the number of categories used in the blog, and adding extra tags to the posts.

At the moment, certain posts may not yet be categorised, or may not have been given tags. This may result in you not finding what you’re looking for. If that is the case, if you find a post that’s missing metadata or if you think that something is wrong with the metadata of another post, please let me know. Also, as we’re also changing the way videos are embedded in the blog, some videos may be unavailable at the moment. Drop me a line !

We expect to have this migration finished by the end of the month. Until then, please bear with us, and wear a hard hat.

Ben of off Scratchin’ Post Comics loves us ! His comics aren’t half bad either (I particularly like the Russian Cat). Cheers !

Every day, this site welcomes about 200 visitors. That’s peanuts compared with the hordes that the likes of Yahoo or even aintitcoolnews.com pull in every hour, but for a humble one-man affair working on a shoe string, I think that’s mighty nice. Especially since I’ve never paid enough attention to promotion or anything remotely resembling marketing. For that : thank you.

But where do you all come from ? A quick glance at my stats that most of you find the Ephemerist through plain old, boring Google. 25 % of you is scavenging the net via a plethora of localized Google Images variants, and another 15 % is just searching around. StumbleUpon is also quite a good source for that kind of accidental hits. So, there goes the link love theory.

Anyway, after a year of blogging, I have the impression I’ve been able to build a good community of loyal readers (even though the majority of visitors were looking for my reports on my dealings with Quechup). Which is quite a nice feeling, I can tell you. I won’t let you down.

As of today, The Ephemerist is also available in a mobile edition. Thanks to the iWPhone Theme and Plugin by ContentRobot, those extra mobile Ephemerist readers can savour their daily fix while on the move and without having to constantly zoom in an out of the page.

iWPhone basically strips the blog of all fancy extra’s (the Flash titles, the sidebar, what have you) and formats the rest in an easy to read template. You can view the complete post (including the graphics, because that’s what it’s all about), browse on categories, leave remarks (why don’t you) and share on digg, del.icio.us and Technorati to your heart’s content. No search as yet, and no diary.

By the way, I’m posting this using the MobileAdmin plugin for Wordpress by Jared Bangs and Dan Cameron. This plugin allows you to use a mobile client for basic WordPress administration tasks, such as writing and editing new posts, managing comments, etc. This plugin too, is no full alternative to the native Admin site, but it really blends in with the iPhone interface, and is very good for basic, text only blogging.

As ever, I’ll keep you posted…

A couple of days ago, this page got stumbled upon. Well, I guess it’s a breather from all the Quechup visits.

Got an email today :

I’m pleased to inform you that your RSS Feed has been selected as a featured feed by Comic-Feed.net. Comic-Feed is a comic blog aggregator. We hand-pick the most interesting comic related RSS feeds and present them in an easy-to-browse format.

I’m quite honored with this, especially after seeing what other blogs are being tracked. Better start posting stuff again soon !

Over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon gives the Ephemerist a nice plug. Coming from that guy, “Comics stuff I haven’t seen before” is about the biggest compliment you can get…

After letting it breathe heavily for a few years, I finally decided to kill off the Word Balloon. Most of its links were dead, I hadn’t spent any time on it for years and I didn’t see myself reviving it pretty soon. So there.

If you want a local copy of the files, just click here (rar-file, 500 kB). Or let it rest in peace.

When they linked to my Spirou post of a while back, the kind people at the Forbidden Planet International Blog Log asked me very nicely if I would like to write for them on eurocomics on a regular basis. Would I !

So, starting this week, tune in to “From our Continental Correspondent” on theForbidden Planet site for news and interesting (I hope) tidbits on the wonderful world of comics on the continent.

Oh, and Joe, many thanks for the kind introduction. You made my day !

Hi there, or as Andrew Marr would say, Hello !

You probably have noticed that I’m quite lacking in the posting rhythm department. I could say that my paying job has been demanding my full attention (which it has) or that I’ve been developing other things in other places (which I have), or even that I wanted to find out what would happen to my visitors rate if I simply stopped posting (it dropped like a brick), but the fact of the matter is, I just got lazy. There, I said it. I couldn’t be bothered.

Being the completist that I am, I’m overwhelmed by a depressing horror vacui when I see non-clickable dates in my blog’s calendar, so I’ll probably fill up last week with fake posts from the fill pile. You’ll see.

Anyhoo, it’s not that I’m doing nothing. Here are some things I’ve got in store for the near future :

• I have, or rather my dad has, been able to get access to a fabulous collection of Liebig illustrated cards that I’m going to try and scan one series at a time.
• My collection of DC public service announcements is almost complete. My goal is collecting each and every strip DC published from the 40’s to the 70’s and present them all on a separate page. It’s probably been done before, but I just wanted to have a list here as well.
• While dusting out my “to classify” pile, I came across a book I had lost a long time ago - “Johny & Annie” by Renaat Demoen. I inherited my copy from my mom, who literally read it to shreds. Somehow, I lack the last two pages, but I’m currently trying to locate them. So expect this gem later this year here, with scans and translations by yours truly.