Best of May, 2014

If you’re not a member of Webcomics.com, here are some of the topics you missed out on last month. If you’re curious about joining, we’ve just made it easier than ever with a $5 trial membership. You’ll get full access to the site for thirty days so you can see what you’ve been missing. At the end of the trial, you can choose to re-subscribe ($30 for 12 months of access) or walk away with no strings attached. You will not be re-billed unless you choose to subscribe.

The links will lead you to content that is “subscription-only” content, but I like to link to it for the people that see something intriguing, join, and then want to delve into what they missed.

Best of the site

Critiques: The Webcomics.com critiques are a great way to discuss the craft of cartooning in real-life terms and situations. This month, we offered our popular Hitch It / Ditch It critique. I reviewed the comics/sites of participants and identified one thing that I thought was exemplary about their work as well as one thing that I thought could stand improvement. Then the members joined in for a fuller discussion.

Square expanded the features of its popular credit-card-processing app with the ability to process transactions offline.

Mailbag Q&A: Is it too soon to run ads on my site?

Disqus: A bug was reported that caused text ads to appear — even though users had opted out of that part of the Disqus service. We discussed the bug, and asked a more important question: If the text ads are unobtrusive, you it make sense to opt in to such a service?

WordPress Pro-Tip: Auto Embed. We discussed how to use WordPress’ auto-embed feature to make quick work of posting blogs with extra media features, and we provided a comprehensive list of sites enabled for this feature.

Syndicate content to Tumblr: We identified a quick-and easy way to automatically post your site’s content to Tumblr.

PageRank Status: This tutorial showed how to keep your site’s PageRank status in full view.

eBay hacked: When eBay announced that their site had been hacked, we were out with an alert and instructions on how to protect yourself.

Photoshop Pro-Top: Rotate Canvas.

Graphic.ly closed

#YesAllWomen: Could reading the #YesAllWomen hashtag feed make you a better writer?

Photoshop ProTip: Tool Presets. (Step-by-step tutorial)

ComicsPress and Comic Easel beta testing: Our members were given the opportunity to help test out the new versions of these popular webcomics stand-bys.