Wonkie Blog

The last few updates on this cartoon blog have taken a little longer than expected.. largely because my learning curve has tapered off as has my free time. A couple of queries to create cartoons for the blog by readers have been very encouraging. As I’ve indicated on our About page, we welcome all input – especially funny input in the form of posts and cartoons! So let us know if you have a particular theme you’d like to cartoon about and we’ll see how you can incorporate it into the site.

For those with limited drawing talent like myself you can create and submit your cartoons made on sites like JustOneSite or HastaMilan together with your post by email – send your submissions to pratish (at) wonkie dot com and we’ll format it for publication here if it’s good, giving you full credit for your efforts.

In the meantime we’re working on a way to allow readers to incorporate the Wonkie cartoons they like directly in their blog, discussion forum, facebook pages etc.. watch this space!

It would be great to hear from any experienced internet marketers out there – particularly on the topic of getting a blog greater visibility. I toyed a little with Google Adwords and found it to be quite an expensive way to generate hits. Still, it’s given me a dozen RSS feed subscribers I otherwise would not have had and set Wonkie well on its way to making us poor cartoonists famous bloggers!

It’s been a rather busy weekend testing and taking live many hacks and changes to Wonkie. It’s all live and nothing seems to have broken (yet!) – hopefully it stays that way.

New features include:

• Three featured cartoon strips:- The Whole Truth (international news and commentary); Bollywood Nights (Bollywood celebrity news and gossip); and Viva South Africa (South African news, commentary, and observations) – These can all be accessed from the main menu bar under the logo
• Structured archives by cartoon strip, date, and cartoon tags (see the left sidebar options for these – e.g. if you want to see all cartoons with Paris Hilton in them click on her name in the Tag Cloud section)
• Wonkie updated to enable posting more than 1 cartoon per day (for days when I’m particularly jobless or just feel like wabbing)
• General colour-scheme, modified page layouts and advertising integration

Next on the list is an email subscription feature that will either email out the latest cartoon once it’s uploaded or send you a link to any new cartoon additions to the site. Let me know if you think there is something else useful I should add too – it would be great to hear your comments!

Wonkie has to say the US presidential campaign is a great source for comic humour – who’d have thought! Ahh – but look at Bush Wonkie hears you say.. Wonkie guesses that should have given some indication of the amount of humorous content you can create.. wonder if they would be any potential to produce a graphic comic novel just capturing his numerous faux pas over his tenure!

Anyway, the site seems to be working well – did something daft yesterday and made it disappear off the planet for a few hours. The cost of finally managing to install Apache server on a USB stick. Some cartoons are quite region specific so am thinking I may have to create more categories or at least have a different way of presenting them on the site – perhaps just using tags and categories rather than comic press. Anyway, thoughts and challenges for another day.. back to writing up press releases now for the real deal!

Ok, so after battling with WordPress and Comicpress the site is finally live! I’m sure it’s not really that complicated but given that I haven’t written a word of PHP code and only found out what CSS stands for a couple of days ago, I’m quite chaffed with myself for getting it all up and running in 3 days on my own!

I managed to install and customise both WordPress and Comicpress to suit my immediate needs (albeit with some dodgy hacks – I feel a little dirty but hey it works!). Immediate needs = I wanted to start a little comic blog covering recent news. Back-dated a few of the cartoons I had created using Just One Site and Hasta Milan and uploaded everything on to the system and spent some time updating tags, meta data, categories, etc manually.. bleh – I hate admin stuff.

Just wanted to spend a few moments to sincerely thank both WordPress and ComicPress, Tyler Martin (Comicpress creator), John Coswell (ComicPress Manager plugin developer) and John Bintz’s notes on using and customising ComicPress – all invaluable in helping me get this project off the ground 🙂 Thanks!

So the plan is basically to produce a dozen or so cartoons per week to post on wonkie.com, hopefully attract some amazing media moghul’s attention so I can sell out for enough to retire comfortably in the Caribbean. Let’s see how that goes 😉