Hey everybody.  I hope you enjoyed the first week of the strip!  There’s plenty more on the way, and I’m really excited about that.

The plan, as I’m sure you know, is to maintain an update schedule of Mondays and Thursdays.  This makes me feel in some ways like I’m one-third of a cartoonist, but other aspects of my life (“day job” work, family, etc.) are too time-consuming and unpredictable for me to do more at the moment.  However, if I’m able to comfortably keep a good enough lead time for long enough, I’m considering upping the ante to three times a week or beyond, or experiment with color.  But that’s a way off yet.

Similarly, I don’t really have the time to keep up with a forum, but I definitely check the comments regularly, and I’d like to try and set up an e-mail address for the strip; probably a gmail account or something.  I love both the feedback and the interaction, so certainly don’t be shy on the comments, and I’ll make an effort to keep up my end of that dialog.

One way of keeping both content and dialog going is the blog.  In addition to any strip-related news, my plan is to do a blog post on Saturdays.  I thought it would be neat if each week I made a recommendation of some kind – talked about something I found useful or entertaining and think might be worth checking out.  I thought this was a good way to keep the blog personal (subjective opinions) without being boring stories about my life in general.  I’ll also be able to cover a wide range of subjects from “shop talk” (favorite drawing tools or writing practices) to entertainment (movies, books, music) to random usefulness of other kinds.  It’ll be an edification grab-bag!  I’ll try a couple and you let me know what you think.  Deal?

So, to start out with an easy one, this week’s recommendation is the RSS feed.  Many of my favorite webcomics (and, of course, blogs) update sporadically or infrequently, and simply adding them to (in my case) Google Reader makes it super easy for me to keep current without having to remember to visit the site.

I mean, come on: who’s going to make a routine out of two non-consecutive weekdays?  Seriously?