Sheldon Needs Help Moving!
Posted November 6th, 2006 by Howard Tayler
Blank Label Comics’ Dave Kellett needs your help. He’s moving his daily strip, Sheldon, to www.sheldoncomics.com tomorrow.
He is leaving United Media to go completely independent… which means he needs help spreading the word to as many people as possible. The majority of Sheldon readers currently get the strip via “comics.com/comics/sheldon”, or via United Media’s e-mail delivery. When the strip moves, these readers won’t have any way to know where the strip went. (Dave tried putting a notice in the strip…it got edited out, and United Media won’t send a “Sheldon is moving” message either.)
(If anybody from United Media is reading this… it may be too late to save the syndication business model, but it’s not too late for you to go out of business with a clean conscience.)
Here’s how you can help not just Dave, but also the thousands of Sheldon fans that United Media is trying to put the screws to. Right now, while you’re thinking about it, take two minutes and post this infomation on your Web site, in a forum you visit, or on your personal blog:
Dave Kellett’s Sheldon is moving to http://www.sheldoncomics.com .
Why are you still reading? Go Do That Right Now. When you come back you can read about the cool new site features like:
- Free access to 5+ years of Sheldon strip archives
- Larger-sized Sunday and daily comics
- Faster loading times
- Free daily delivery of Sheldon by e-mail
- Free RSS feed
- Free “Send This Strip to a Friend” feature
- “Jump to a Random Strip” feature
- No pop-up/pop-under ads
- Daily blog
- Direct links to the forum, store, and more
- … basically, everything the strip didn’t have at comics.com
November 6th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Note: TODAY, November 6th, Sheldoncomics.com still resolves to the United Media site. Tomorrow that should change…
November 6th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Submitted as a potential article to Slashdot. Good luck, Dave.
November 6th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Don’t just write the plain text “Dave Kellett’s Sheldon is moving to http://sheldoncomics.com”. Use markup, which helps the search engines (especially Google) find the site for appropriate search terms: Dave Kellett’s Sheldon has moved to http://sheldoncomics.com. It looks like the search term “Sheldon” already leads to http://sheldoncomics.com as the first hit, but let’s make sure it stays way during and after the move; metadata considered useful.
For reference and easy copy-pasting:
<a href=”http://sheldoncomics.com”>Dave Kellett’s Sheldon has moved to http://sheldoncomics.com</a>
Also, since Dave Kellett plans to make the full archives available, any way to change the FAQ at http://www.sheldoncomics.com/comics/sheldon/html/about_author.html to stop plugging the “Comics Extra” and “Comics Extra Gold” services for obtaining the archives? If he has any form of access to write on that page, he might manage to sneak in changes for a while.
It looks like the c*mics.com page links to a cafepress store for buying Sheldon merchandise. Does that money go through UP, or directly to Dave? If the former, Dave should consider setting up his own merchandise page, and we should all point to it, so that UP stops getting a cut.
Also, it might help to do some Google searches using their feature to find pages which link to a given page, and ask some of those sites to change their links. In particular, notifying some of the comic aggregator sites, and any fellow comics with a link, would help greatly.
Finally, since it looks like the c*mics.com page still links to http://www.davekellett.com/ , he should add a prominent notice on that page and specifically on all the pages that c*mics.com links to, so that people might find it.
November 6th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Hot diggity-damn.
Two days ago the search term “Sheldon” didn’t turn up “sheldoncomics.com” until page 5 of results.
re: everything else — I’ve passed this along.
–Howard
November 6th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
One other idea: given the tech readership Sheldon gets, how about sending a story to a couple of tech-related news sites? For example, Slashdot or Boing Boing might run a “Sheldon goes independent” story. Make sure the server can handle the traffic first, though. :)
November 6th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Ah, looks like someone already thought of that idea; hope Dave can handle the traffic.
November 6th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Hmmm, it looks like Wordpress’s auto-linking of URLs broke my explicit links; it nested an <a> in another <a> (not valid HTML) and also thought my closing </a> formed part of one of the links.
November 6th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Josh: Yeah, WP nicely broke the clean code-commented text you created. “Do what I SAY, stupid computer! And take me LITERALLY!”
November 6th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Keep in mind that it may take up to five days for the DNS change for the new site to propagate. A link at his personal site with the IP address instead of the domain name might ease that transition.
November 6th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
It’s linked on my site, for what it’s worth. I didn’t realize Howard had pings turned of for now, so I’ve been watching for my ping to show up, but it didn’t. Anywho, link posted.
November 6th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
Odd, my comment disappeared. Well, good luck to Mr. Kellet. I know I’ll keep reading.
November 6th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
YAYAY! Sheldon will have RSS. One more comic I can remove from my bookmarks and put in Bloglines.
Oh, and Howard, in case you didn’t see that:
RSS = GOOD
All part of my hope to convert all my online comics reading to RSS some day.
November 6th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Dave: Sorry for the disappearing stuff — comments are moderated, and the first comment from any new user is always held in the queue until I approve it.
November 7th, 2006 at 7:37 am
Dutifully posted in my blog.Thanks for the heads up, I read Sheldon religiously and have been more than a little miffed with C*mics.com for not updating properly.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
It’s information, but who’s scoring?
Done, on my website
Good luck, Dave