This one is not really fan art, but still awesome! Our friend Denis Lachapelle made us a custom drawing for our 9th Anniversary (which was yesterday, April 1st). Thank you, Denis for the really great art! <3
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Custom art from Denis Lachapelle![/caption]
Awesome Fan Art!
One of our youngest fans made us some awesome fan art! Thank you, Miss Xing Xing S. from Wisconsin!!
Twitter Primer
Twitter is sort of like text messaging, but shorter: only 140 characters. Twitter users are identified by their @ handles: @misangela, @taqueriavecino, @carolynscupcake. If you don’t put the @, then that person will not know that you are tweeting to or about them.
Hashtags (#) are officially used to make a topic trend, but we Twitter folk tend to use them for all sorts of silliness. You’ll see stuff like #AIDSday, #oscarredcarpet or #fb, which is the hashtag that you can use to crosspost a tweet to FB. The thing that makes this #fb tag work is an app called Selective Tweets that you can install on FB.
Another part of twitter is retweeting. You’ll see RT in front of a post that has been retweeted (reposted) from someone you follow. This is how twitter users pass along info and get trends started. By using retweets and hashtags, you’ll see topics trend like mad. If you’ll look over your @ mentions, you’ll see that there are twitter users who follow you and retweet your posts occasionally. RTs are seen by all the followers of the person RTing, so you see how things can become exponential.
The basic rule for twitter advertising is this: repeat your deal 3x a day: morning, noon and night. This is to cover as many followers as possible. Twitter is a stream. TONS of tweets are missed due to the immediacy of it. That’s why tweeting 3x is useful. BUT I wouldn’t do that every day. There is such a thing as twitter spam and repeating yourself a lot every day will run off your followers.
Speaking of immediacy, it’s bad form to reply to an old tweet. Because of the flow of Twitter, it’s difficult to reply to someone commenting on a tweet from 3 days ago without context. If you do comment on something old (over a few hours), it’s best to preface your tweet with RE:[content of tweet you’re referencing]. That way the person your are tweeting to has an idea of what you’re talking about!
If only 10 of your followers RT your tweet, you can assume that you’ll reach 1000 people. Pretty cool, eh?
Twitter is a dynamic social conversation. You can interact with celebrities just as easily as friends. It truly is democratic in that way. I tweet a LOT on my personal feed. In fact, 95% of anything you see on my FB page is crossposted from Twitter.
I think Twitter is the best social media available. Get out there and TWEET SOMETHING! Here are the feeds we run:
@indigodragonIDS because a squatter got indigodragon. >:(
@misangela my personal feed
@thinkweasel Nick’s personal and comics feed
Web Hosting
Finding a good host for your site(s) is always a challenge. Outages, slow loads, mysterious server emails and support people who don’t help you are all things that are endemic to the hosting biz, sadly. For me, downtime is the bane of my existence and it happens all the time, with all hosts.
Despite these issues, our current host is SiteGround and they seem to be doing an ok job at keeping things running and wrangling the errant server. For uptime, they are definitely the best I’ve used.[as of Nov 2017]
If your site is down and you’re not sure if it’s just your connection or the server really is down, you can use https://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ to check. I also use https://www.siteuptime.com/, which offers free monitoring of one site.
You’ve got to stay on top of your sites. Your host will not tell you if your site is down and more often than not, they’ll deny it. So be proactive and monitor your sites daily.
We are DIGITAL!
Graphicly gave us a big surprise: they put all our small collections online for us! Free! We don’t know why they did it, but we’ll take it!
I really can’t articulate how much Graphicly has meant to us. Their support for an unknown, tiny comic has been unflagging and we are eternally grateful. If you are starting out and want to get digital distribution without all the hassle and for a VERY reasonable price, please talk to Graphicly. They will rock your face off!
You can find all three collections (the first is FREE) in these fine establishments: Kindle/Amazon, Nook and you can search “think weasel” on iTunes!
If you woud be so kind to download the first one for free and give us some reviews, we’ll send you a signed hard copy if you want one. We are so stoked, we’ll send you one just for ASKING! :) Drop us a line or comment here if you’d like a first collection sent to you.