WordOwl

WordOwl is pleased to announce - earlier than originally intended, no less - that the next comic to join is none other than Cool Cat Studio, the first strip created by Gisele Lagace (artist for Menage a 3 and Penny & Aggie)

Set in the graphic design shop of the same name, Cool Cat Studio follows the antics of the owners Belinda and Jeremy, their cat Camus (after which the studio is named) and its staff, Sophia, Michael and most infamously, the enigmatic Liz Adams.

Cool Cat Studio ended its initial run in 2001, but had a follow-on run from June 2007 until September 2008.

WordOwl is extremely proud to announce the addition of the latest comic’s archive to join: Locus, by Adam Black.

Featuring full-colour art, high octane action and more, Locus follows the adventures of the title character through a veritable minefield of punch-ups that put The Matrix to shame.

Not for the easily offended, or faint of heart, Locus has a tagline that definitely pushes it into the adult arena, with the comic catering for people that don’t just expect a gag a day from comics, but a deeper, thought-provoking storyline and art from an artist who worked on the KISS 4K comic books.

Locus updates Monday, Wednesday and Friday and should be considered 18+, if nothing else for the tagline, “Boobs, Blood, and Bad Language”

Due to interest over the technical details of how WordOwl works, we have started to compile a series of articles on its technical development over time, including design decisions that were not communicated or discussed, and some insider details.

Details are already available on the four generations of code in WordOwl, plus insider details on the data format used to hold the comic data.

More is still to come though, and if you want to see any additional details please contact us.

The full list of articles is available, through How It Works.

WordOwl is pleased to announce that the downtime on updates over the last 5 days is over and that the strips up until today are now all added.

Unless the situation changes drastically, there is going to be a delay in updating strips over the next few days.

I am not closing the site; search facilities will continue to be available during this time, however I will have at best limited access to email, and no facility to update strip details, hence the delay in updating.

This is caused by real life situations which cannot be avoided. I am also not taking this opportunity to hand updates over to any third party, although that has been considered. Specifically there is only one other person that I have discussed any part of the technical structure of WordOwl with and thus would have some of the knowledge concerning the update process.

But the reality is that despite the fact that although we have discussed the possibility, it is not appropriate nor practical to burden them with this, and thus updates will have to be on hiatus until I am in a position to continue them.

The current plan is as follows:

• Thursday updates - updated as normal
• Friday updates - updated as early as is practical (any strips released after 9.30am GMT will not be updated on time.)
• Saturday - delayed
• Sunday - delayed
• Monday - delayed
• Tuesday - delayed
• Wednesday - all strips will be caught up to date, probably no earlier than 8pm GMT.

A further update will be posted when this is all up to date. In the meantime, Monday’s “Comic of the Week” article will posted ahead of time and scheduled to switch to ‘posted’ on time.

WordOwl is extremely pleased to announce the 16th webcomic to be available for searching: Randall Munroe’s xkcd.

xkcd is one of the more recent stars of the webcomic field, combining romance, mathematics and science in a unusual but reliably funny way.

Unlike many other comics, xkcd’s artwork is extremely minimal, mostly concerning stick figures, but stick figures with amazing insights, not to mention the notorious Mr Black Hat and his sociopathic ways.

xkcd updates on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with occasional bonus updates mid-week.

WordOwl is extremely pleased to annouce three webcomics that will be joining the search engine’s archives.

Many thanks to Barry T. Smith, of InkTank, for allowing us to also add his three earlier strip archives.

From the words of Barry himself:

Sorry, We’re Open: The Citadel is a comic book and gaming store run by the MacNeill brothers. It’s a childhood dream come true, at least for Owen. Since his brother Ian is the responsible one, he’s the one who loses sleep over the whole venture … but in the end there is nothing they’d rather be doing. [more]

Weak-end Warriors is a look into the lives of a diverse group of paintball players. These fun loving folks congregate every weekend at Pollock’s Ranch, a paintball field run by Roland. [more]

Angst Technology is the name of a computer game company. A small start up, the employees are all drawn together with the vision of creating truly kick ass games. The only thing stopping them is their vastly diverse opinions about what a kick ass game is. [more]

Already, the archive of Sorry, We’re Open is up and we’ll be adding the other material very shortly.

On the back of recovering from hardware failure, WordOwl is proud to announce the addition of the 5,000th strip to its archive!

This is not an indication of WordOwl stopping development, simply a point to reflect on that 5,000 strips - and indeed, the first 1,500 official strips from Bruno the Bandit - have been transcribed now, and that more is to come.

We are pleased to announce that WordOwl is back up and running at full strength today after a three day delay due to hardware failure.

Although other data has been lost in the failure, WordOwl’s development files were undamaged so we have run the updates since Wednesday night and are now caught up on everything that has happened over the last three days.

We have also put further measures in place to avoid this happening again in the future.

Current Mood: cheerful

Due to a critical hardware failure within the development server, I will not be able to post any new comic transcriptions for a few days until the parts in question are repaired/replaced. Existing transcriptions will continue to be available however; WordOwl.com itself is not affected, merely the development of new transcriptions is.

I am currently working on the relevant repairs to try and resurrect the parts in question, however it may be a few days before I am able to catch up and transcribe comics again.

I apologise for the problems I know this will cause and steps are being taken to resolve this, but as a hobbyist computer user only, I don’t have the funds in order to maintain redundant systems or such like.

Rest assured, as soon as we are able, we will catch up with any backlog that we have.