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  Last strip: #168 (Monday May 21, 2007)
Local time: Tuesday March 19, 2024 05:30:23 UTC

 
The Botmaker  

News

Tuesday April 10, 2007
        This monht is one of the two big comic convention months for me. I'll be having a stand both in the Jerez Comic Convention and later in the Barcelona Comic Convention. This means I'll hardly be around to draw the strips for these weeks. So the Botmaker will be on hiatus until April 30th, when strip #166 will be published. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I really won't be able to draw a strip prior to that date. Sorry again, come back on April 30th.
 
Tuesday March 13, 2007
        There will be no botmaker this week, due to me being very busy. I'm already working on next week's strip, so it will be posted on time. Sorry for the delay.
 
Sunday January 14, 2007
        Tomorrow's strip is already done and uploaded, so you're guaranteed there'll be a new strip tomorrow. Sorry for having missed last monday's deadline. I have a mind of trying harder to be on schedule. Sorry for the delay.

As for the spammers, I've set up a filter that won't allow anybody to insert a comment with a link, be it HTML or BB styled, nor a comment that begins with http:// as the first 7 characters. Hope that helps stop most of them spambots.
 
Friday December 29, 2006
        First off, I want to apologize for the lack of continuity this last month. The Botmaker is officially on holiday until January the 8th, when there will be a new strip, and weekly updates will start once again.

Secondly, I want to mention spambots. There's been a flooding of spam on the comments sections, with evil SpamBots leaving something around a hundred spam messages a week. This is very tiresome to you, who must endure the adds to read the comments, and to me, who must delete them. I'm considering what to do about it, and my main options right now seem to be:

a) Remove the commentaries altogether (but leaving the ones already there in place).

b) Coding a registration/login system so you must register in order to post comments, thus allowing for a way to filter spammers.

c) Leaving it just like this, but allowing posting only on the current strip, and having a maximum of 15 posts per strip.

So, what do you all think about it? I'd like to read your comments on the matter. Please use the COMMENT feature to leave feedback.
 
Monday November 6, 2006
        Last week there was no strip. From October 27th to October 29th the Barcelona Manga Convention was held in Barcelona, and we had a booth in there for selling t-shirts, illustrations and other stuff. This left me with little time and energy to draw last week's strip, so I just jumped it. I'm sorry, but I hope you understand the reason.
 
Monday October 2, 2006
        Vacation's over now, and the Botmaker is back on track. Thanks for your understanding.
 
Friday September 22, 2006
        I've gone out on vacation, and so there will be no Botmaker for the next two weeks. I'm really sorry I didn't put up the on vacation sign earlier, I kind of started my vacations and forgot.

The Botmaker will be back on Monday, October the 2nd. Thanks for your understanding.
 
Tuesday August 22, 2006
        I've added an RSS Feed for the webcomic. If any of you is using an aggregator program, you can add it so that you're notified of new strips when they go online.

The URL of the feed is http://www.library-of-rain.com/botmaker/rss/rss.php and it is a valid RSS 2.0 XML document. The PHP extension is not an error, the file is still RSS 2.0 with the correct XML header. So your aggregator should just seamlessly eat it up.

The feed contains the last five strips, sorted from newest to oldest, and is automatically updated whenever a new strip is posted on the site. I hope you find this helpful to you. Please, don't hesitate to drop me an e-mail or post a comment regarding the feed.
 
Monday June 19, 2006
        As you have noticed already, last week there was no strip. I tried hard to have one done by monday, then tuesday, then thursday. To no avail. Saturday came ,and I still was trying to find the time and energy to finish drawing it and start coloring. So I have decided to just skip a week, and post this one for today, monday.

Sorry there was no strip last week, but I just couldn't do it. I regret that, but I'll keep them coming once a week nonetheless.

See you in seven!
 
Wednesday June 14, 2006
        This week's comic will be posted on thursday. I know I promised to do it for yesterday, but I've been really busy and am suffering mild sleep deprivation. I don't want to make excuses, so I'll just say that I'll draw it thursday afternoon, and hope to post it on thursday evening to late evening. Sorry again for the long delay.
 
Monday June 12, 2006
        This past weekend was the Barcelona Comic Convention. I had a stand there together with my girlfriend, where we were selling t-shirts and stuff. It was great, even though the sells were overall somehow low, mainly due to he convention having quite bad timing.

The thing is, I worked around 14 hours a day for five days straight, mostly standing and selling to the public, and am now exhausted. Due to this, I didn't have the time to draw the strip during the weekend, and I don't have the brainpower to draw it today. So I'll just collapse as soon as I get back home, and today's strip will be posted tomorrow (tuesday). Sorry for the delay, but please understand that I'm completely exhausted
 
Thursday June 8, 2006
        I've been asked this by a few people, so I'm going to make a note here:

A boater is a straw hat, typical of the early 20th century. It's what Kaolin always wears. If you want more information about this, I recommend the Wikipedia article on Boaters for further reading.
 
Tuesday June 6, 2006
        Today, we make it into a whole year after the site was relaunched. I'm glad this is working out fine, and even though I'd like to do more than a strip a week, this periodicity works for me and allows me to update regularly.

Hope you've all enjoyed the first year since relaunching, and that you'll stick around for a long time. ^__^
 
Monday June 5, 2006
        Strip posted, sorry for the delay. Thanks for your patience.
 
Monday June 5, 2006
        Today's strip will be posted later on today. Sorry for the delay.
 
Friday April 7, 2006
        You'll probably have noticed there's now a Donate through PayPal button on the lower left corner of the main page. This is a big issue for me, and I've given it much thought.

I've been thinking for a while about wether I should put such a button on the site or not. On one hand, I need the money. Also, I put a lot of effort on the webcomic. On the other hand, I'm by no means a professional, nor do I intend to be one. I don't have the quality, the quantity or the intention to qualify as a professional cartoonist. Mainly, I don't have the talent. =P

So these issues have been going on in my mind for a while. I have finally decided to put the button on the site, mainly because my financial situation is not great and I'd welcome some extra money.

I hope none of you takes this as me implying I'm a professional now. Also, it doesn't mean I'll start charging for the strip. I won't. I won't charge for it in the future either. This is just what the button says: a donation. If you feel like giving some money, I'm willing to accept it. That's all. No obligation for you.
 
Monday March 13, 2006
        Today's strip will be slightly delayed, but it'll still be up today. I'm planning on having it published around 16:00 EST.
 
Monday February 27, 2006
        Here's today's strip. In the nick of time, but I made it within the deadline. Sorry if I kept you waiting.
 
Monday February 27, 2006
        I'm a bit late with today's strip, but I'm still aiming at posting it in time. Not first thing in the morning as usual, but I'll try to have it up late at night today. If I make it before midnight, I'll still be technically on time. Sorry for the delay (again).
 
Sunday January 29, 2006
        Hello all, I'm sorry for the delay in new strips. The site has been on hiatus, but I'll start posting new strips, once a week as usual, starting on February 6th. I want to apologize for my lazyness once again.
 
Monday January 9, 2006
        Here's the new strip. It's a bit late, but it's still monday, so technically it's on time. With this one, I'll continue from the point where we left off before the server crashed. Enjoy.
 
Sunday December 25, 2005
        New strips will be posted starting Monday January 9th, past the holiday season. I'm using this time to finish fixing everything that went wrong after the server crash that destroyed all the databases.

Sorry for the delay, thanks for your patience, and have a Merry Christmas and a Hapy New Year all!
 
Wednesday December 14, 2005
        The Botmaker site has been down for three weeks. The hosting company announced on November 25th that the server died, and what's more important, they didn't know when they would set-up the whole thing again. Also, they didn't seem to have neither back-ups nor SWAP drives, so that means everything in there has been lost.

Now, this isn't such a biggie since I keep a backup of everything both at home and at work (for safer storage), but there's some stuff that has indeed been lost forever, and that's the user comments so far. I'm sorry guys, but all your user comments (all six of them) have been lost forever, and there's no way I can bring them back. I can only promise that I'll back up the database more often, so as to avoid this from happening again.

So, to make a long story short, I fed up with waiting and just signed with a new hosting company. Some stuff like the storyarchs has been lost, and I'll slowly re-do it. Other stuff, like reader comments and all the news for the last year, have been lost forever.

Sorry.

On the other hand, I've kept on drawing the strips, so I'll post three or four of them on Monday. Keep tuned, and sorry for everything.
 
Monday June 6, 2005
        The site has been officially relaunched as of today. I intend to publish a new strip each monday morning. Welcome back to you all!
 
Friday May 13, 2005
        After much thought and quite a few years of not having enough time, I've decided to relaunch the site. I've really missed drawing the webcomic, and I can say for sure the only reason stopping me from doing this has been lack of time.

Now, it's not that I have much free time again, but I've decided to give it a go anyway. Periodicity will be much sparser, though, since there's just no way I can keep up with four strips a week as I used to. So it'll be just one strip a week, posted every monday. Sorry for that.

The other major change is that the strip will now be hand-drawn and computer-colored, instead of being drawn and colored in the computer as it used to be. The reason is as simple as me not having my old Wacom anymore. Thing is, I draw bad enough that not having a CTRL+Z command won't make that much of a difference.

Right now I'm building up some buffer strips, so that if I go lazy sometime in the future, I can still catch up without missing a deadline. The planned relaunch date is June 6th 2005.

Hope this is good news to all three of you who read this. =D
 
Friday July 5, 2002
        Ok, there are some news in my life that make me very happy but won't make you happy. For one, I got a new job as webmaster at the spanish branch of Games Workshop. Also, a couple of friends and me recently opened a goth club, called Erebus. What all this means is, I got almost not free time at the moment. I've been keeping up with the strip for the past couple of weeks thanks to having many issues drawn in advance, but I've ran out of the buffer strips, so I face a decission.

So I decided to temporarily discontinue the strip, since I wouldn't be able to keep up the periodicity.

This doesn't mean the strip is over, it just means that during the month of July there won't be any new strips. Once we get to August and the Erebus club doesn't eat up so much of my free time, the strip will go back online. I'll probably have to decrease the regularity back to three time a week as it was before, though.

Thanks to all for your time and understanding.
 
Thursday May 30, 2002
        Today is my birthday, and I wanted to give you all who read the webcomic a little present. At first I thought about doing a drawing or something like that, but that's not really much effort, and I wanted to do something special. So after thinking about it for a while, I've decided the present to be this: from Monday June 3rd, the comic strip will be up four times a week instead of three. The update days will now be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Hope you enjoy the present. Maybe next year I'll make it daily. =P
 
Sunday May 5, 2002
        I added a calendar view of the archives page. You can now browse old strips either as a list or by dates. Check it out! =]
 
Monday April 22, 2002
        Many of you have told me how the older strips were very difficult to read, due to the pink color and the hand-writing. I've turned them all to black and white and redone the lettering using the font that you can see in the later issues of the strip. I have also added two new entries to the art page.
 
Wednesday April 17, 2002
        The characters page has been updated. The newer characters have been added, and the descriptions to some of the older ones have been revised.
 
Monday March 25, 2002
        I added an art page to the site. I'll be posting there art I do about the comic strip or other comic-like art by me. I'll also post there fan art, in the unlikely case I get any. =D
 
Tuesday March 19, 2002
        Wow! R.K. Milholland, from Something Positive, not only included my fan art on his webcomic, he even recomended the botmaker! Read all about it at his site.. I´m truly impressed and incredibly flattered. =D
 
Sunday March 10, 2002
        All the navigation images have been redone. Initially they were jpg files, but have been now converted to gif so they can have transparency. The background of the menu should now merge seamlessly into the page. Also, I added a logo to the site. It will undergo a little changes because I'm not yet happy with it, but it will be more or less as it is now.
 
Tuesday March 5, 2002
        The main navigation meny has been retouched. It now uses graphics instead of simple text links. I hope this makes it more visible and makes for easier and more intuitive navigation.
 
Wednesday February 27, 2002
        Added a links section. I hope to soon replace the text links on the main navigation with graphic ones that are easier to see. Also, I did a small button for linking to this site. You can find it in the links section.
 
Saturday February 23, 2002
        The news bits (like this one) are converted to a MySQL database, too, for an easier updating. The archives have been re-done for easier browsing.
 
Wednesday February 20, 2002
        The site is converted to PHP + MySQL for automated updating of the last strip. What that means is, now I'll be able to upload the strips as I draw them, and the site will automatically hide the ones that are not yet due, and make them available when their time has come.
 
Sunday February 17, 2002
        The site goes online for the first time. My intention is to issue a new strip three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
 


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