So, I'm signed up to get the e-mails of the comics as they come out, with the three latest bits of news underneath. There have been some... difficulties. For instance, I didn't get yesterday's (the one that came out Sunday night, for Monday). And now I got Tuesday's, and actually it's missing the most recent two news posts. What's up?
(This might be another case of what happened in the "i must admin" thread, where Jon tells me to not bother the whole forum with this. But I figure, if anyone else has problems, we should all shout at Jon/Phil together? It could be fun!)

No, this is a totally legit problem that occurs when a strip gopes up on the site after midnight (as was the case with Monday's strip). The email script gets triggered at midnight, and whatever was the latest comic to be uploaded is the one that gets sent out.

I asked Phillip to fix this a bunch of months ago, and then again a few weeks ago, so it should only be a matter of a few more months now. Apparently there is all sorts of complicated tearing down and complete rebuilds for this and that that needs to get done in order to set things right, so please be patient and we'll have it fixed by the time impeachment proceedings begin.

I also have to redo the email template, but that's another story.

In fact, Jon's reply contains a ready-made answer to all of life's questions:

It's Phillip's fault.

Despite Jon's assertions that anything that he thinks I should be doing is inherently easy enough to be finished within a day or so, that isn't always the case.

There's actually two separate issues right now. One is that the scripts to do emails always run at midnight instead of triggering when Jon finally gets around to uploading a strip. The second is that the old system doesn't work quite right with the redesigned site, since a large amount of the impetus for the redesign was consolidation of the Megagamerz [megagamerz.com] under-the-hood code with the Goats stuff. Hence the lack of news posts written since the redesign.

Fixing the second issue is a fair amount of work, and at this point needs to be done before doing the first. So, they're on my bug/todo list, and will probably get resolved before Jon adds another installment to Patent Pending. Probably before another installment of Worlds of Peril, for that matter.

In retrospect, Patent Pending will work better as a movie anyway.

As a side note, to derail this thread some more, will there be a PDA-friendly version of the page? I imagine a media='handheld' css sheet could work nicely, but an alternate version like what used to be in place could work as well.

The strip doesn't rotate well anymore now that it's double-sized on most days, unfortunately. I'm not sure what the solution to that would be.

We could certainly create an alternate stylesheet, but I'm not sure that would help the inherent problem of reading the complete strip on a tiny screen.

Perhaps scale the strip down in with the handheld stylesheet, and make the strip container a link to just the strip image? I don't know about other handheld browsers, but mine will let me display some stuff in a wider mode and scroll around.

I'm not sure what the solution to that would be.

larger PDAs.

Now you have invented the laptop. Go back in time, quick.

Maybe you can figure out a way to integrate with iTunes. Then I can read your comic on my iPod.

And then Jeffrey Rowland won't have any more time to write his comics, as he will be traveling the country ala Jay & Silent Bob, kicking the ass of all your fans who read comics this way.

actually, i think i invented the tablet...

[ytmnd.com]