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Hi everybody! This is going to be the first of a monthly feature here at the Comics Curmudgeon. It’s come to my attention lately that many of my readers are unfamiliar with all the stuff that this site has to offer. So, once a month, I’m going to highlight it all for you! If you’re totally familiar with all the doodads and hoohahs along the left side of your screen, you can just skip all this; but if you’re not, you might want to read on. It may surprise you! And in future installments of this post, I will highlight features that were added in the previous month.

Anyway, here’s some of the features of this site that go beyond the front page!

Archives. This site has been publishing for nearly two years now, and every single post is still available for your amusement. Check out the archives menu just below all the advertising (or click here to jump there). You can see all the posts that deal with a particular comic; see all the posts from a particular month; or search on a keyword or phrase. If you’re feeling reckless, you can also click on the Randomly Selected Post O’ Mystery and enjoy an arbitrary entry from the past; this post will change every time you reload the page.

Discussion. Everybody knows that you can put witty comments on each post. But did you know that there’s a full-fledged Comics Curmudgeon discussion board where you can chat with your fellow comics fans? It’s true! Before you sign up to participate there, though, you should read the posting and discussion policies (which apply to comments on the main blog too, for that matter).

Subscribing. Tired of hitting “Refresh” on your browser over and over? Would you like to be alerted every time this blog is updated? You can, thanks to the magic of RSS Webfeeds. Check out the “Subscribe” heading in the left-hand navigational column. Click the “RSS” icon to get the URL to my feed for the newsreader of your choice. Alternately, you can click on any on any of the icons below it to add my site to a variety of popular feed-reading services. You can get updates on your My Yahoo!, My MSN, or Google homepage; add me to your Bloglines or Newsgator page; or even to your Livejournal friends list or your del.icio.us page, with just one click!

If the idea of getting Comics Curmudgeon updates automatically appeals to you but you have no idea what the hell anything in that last paragraph means, feel free to e-mail me and I’ll try to help you out.

Josh’s other comics projects. I do a bit of Comics Curmudgeoning on other sites as well. I write a weekly column called Cartoon Violence on Wonkette, a snarky political blog; it’s pretty much the same schtick as I do here, only with political cartoons, and lots more swearing, and it’s updated every Friday. I also write a short blurb called the Geek Comic of the Week for ITworld.com, a site that focuses on computers and IT; it focuses on Web comics and other cartoons outside of your daily paper with a geeky twist to them, and it’s updated every Sunday night.

Merchandising. Those smiling faces at the bottom of the ad bar aren’t just for show. They’re modeling delightful Comics Curmudgeon gear, which is available for purchase on CafePress! Yes, you can wear and/or drink out of merchandise reminding you of classics Comics Curmudgeon moments, such as “More zippers, mule!”, “In the absence of weights, I am employing isometrics”, Milford’s big gambling bust, “Roadside”, and Fence Post Frank. Um, and I realize that some of these catchphrases are pretty old by now. New ones coming soon! Maybe.

Advertising. Comics Curmudgeon readers are collectively the best people in the entire world, it goes without saying. Therefore, you’d be wise to market your product or service to them. And you can, by advertising on this site. Thanks to BlogAds, you can do so pretty easily. Just click here to get started. I think you’ll find the rates quite reasonable!

Tipping. “Gosh,” you may very well be saying, “Josh does all this for me; what I can do to make his life a little easier?” Well, you can always put a bit of scratch in my virtual tip jar through the magic of PayPal. Rest assured that every dollar I get allows me to spend less time on my boring real job and more time putting hilarious stuff on my site. Click here to start!

Anyway, thanks to all of you for your support, readership, and hilarious commentary. I’m way too narcissistic to keep doing this without knowing that you’re all out there reading this, so keep it up!

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Some of you may not have seen Monday’s Pearls Before Swine:

Those of you who did see it may have thought that its worse crime was the egregious punnery that brought Rat to tears in panel three. However, today’s Baltimore Sun ran a letter to the editor with a different view:

Crude comic insults the devotion of nuns

In light of all the calamities confronting our country, it might seem rather mundane to write a letter to the editor concerning the comics. However, there are so many ways that artists and writers chip away at any of the core values left in America.

Two of the most decent comics that were in The Sun, Prince Valiant and Mark Trail, were eliminated and replaced with yet more inane and offensive comic strips.

Could it be that those comics were dropped because they dared to mention God at various intervals?

On Monday, Stephan Pastis hit a new low when his Pearls Before Swine strip mentioned a nun having enemas with the crudest of entertainers, Eminem. How disgusting.

I had three aunts in the convent who dedicated their lives to the poor. The nuns in our parochial schools gave my children an excellent education that has served them well.

This cartoon is a slap in the face to each of these self-sacrificing women.

Polly Thornton

Elkridge

Mind you, this was written before they start putting bestiality in the Jumble, so things are only going downhill faster and faster. If anyone can point me to a religious tenant that declares enemas to be sinful — or for that matter, a religiously themed Mark Trail — I’d be grateful. Last Christmas Mark gave Jesus short shrift so he could focus on Santa, so I’m not convinced of his piety.

Speaking of the decline and fall of our civilization, faithful reader Victoria Solomon recently sent me a link to a video she and her little friends made mocking another good-hearted and decent comic, the Family Circus. Enjoy, heathens!

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People are noting (on the main site, not the forum site) that the “Name,” “E-mail address”, and “URL” fields for making a comment, which are normally prepopulated with the last values you used on whatever computer you’re using, are coming up prepopulated with other people’s identities. This is obviously annoying, and, if people’s e-mail addresses are being exposed, is in contradiction with my policy of not making poster’s e-mail addresses public. I am trying to figure out the problem; please use this post to describe exactly what it is you’re seeing. Be sure to tell me what browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) and what operating system (Windows XP, Windows 98, Mac OS X, etc.) you’re using.

(WARNING: Boring technical stuff to follow! If this stuff doesn’t interest you, stop reading now! But if you want to know my theory about why this is happening, read on.) The reason I did the technical fiddling I did last weekend was because I was getting warnings from my ISP that my site was eating up too much server resources. Basically, WordPress (the software that runs my site) stores all the information about posts, comments, etc. in a database, and constructs the Web pages you see dynamically every time you access the site. When you have as many visitors as I do, this can put quite a strain on the computer running your Web site. What I did was add a caching feature to WordPress. Now, instead of building each Web page from scratch time someone accesses it, WordPress builds a static version of the page once and then presents that static version to anyone who comes along until the page changes. This should cut my server load dramatically. However, it appears that in the process, the prepopulated values in the comment fields are also being stored on these static pages! I’m going to see what I can do about changing this. It may be that you will have to re-enter your name every time you want to comment; my primary goal is to stop other people’s information from coming up.