And now for some silliness. I figure this blog’s target audience is more likely to search for “Flash” or “Barry Allen” or “Wally West” than the actual title of the site, but out of curiosity I searched Google for “speed force.” Here’s what I found on the first page: Continue reading
I just found out that Speed Force won the October 2008 Project Fanboy Award! (That explains the traffic I was getting from them last week!)
I remember the first ever website award I got was for the “Site of the Week” award from what was then called Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources. A lot of fan sites would give out awards back in the late 1990s, and then it sort of fell out of fashion. It’s cool that there are sites still doing it — and it’s cool to have actually been honored by one!
Thanks to whoever nominated Speed Force for the award, and thanks to the Project Fanboy staff!
Fellow Flash blogger Dixon of Crimson Lightning writes about catching up on his Flash comic index and launching a new feature, “Fast Talk,” all about the technobabble with which the Flashes breeze past the laws of physics.
Wizard Magazine’s 2009 preview, shipping in December, will feature an interview with Geoff Johns in which he talks about Flash: Rebirth. (via Comic Bloc’s BESTBUY)
That Flash neon sign coming in June? Comics Infinity is offering pre-orders for 10% off. (via aeryncrichton)
Aspen Studios’ planned tribute to founder Michael Turner has been making the rounds at The Pulse and elsewhere, and Newsarama has followed up with a short interview with Vince Hernandez.
The Pulse interviews Brea Grant, speedster Daphne from Heroes. Anyone else notice that they still keep dressing her in red?
Finally, Comics Should Be Good has a list of the Top Five Flashes. I’m sure most Flash fans will find something to disagree with in this list. 😀
Some administrivia today.
1. As of Monday, it’s been three months since I launched this blog. I have no idea what the typical lifetime for a comics-related blog is, but I can say I’ve kept this up far more regularly than I expected, with 162 posts in 94 days — an average of 1.7 posts per day! — and readers have made nearly 350 comments!
It’s also taking a lot more time than I expected, which has kept me away from other projects. (In particular, I’d planned a major update for the Alternative Browser Alliance this summer, which has become more urgent with the announcement and first beta of Google’s Chrome web browser.) I may be scaling back a little on Speed Force soon, but I’ll still aim for several posts a week.
2. I finally got around to replacing the banner at the top of the page. I didn’t want to stick with the theme’s default, since “train station” doesn’t really say “speedster,” and I was never really satisfied with the fractal “lightning.” (Besides, the smallest I could get that image without making it look really nasty was a whopping 50 KB.)
Still, I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer or an artist. Give me the graphics and I’ll build the HTML and CSS to turn them into a web page, but original art? It would make XKCD look like George Pérez. So instead of trying to draw something, I looked for photos of actual lightning on Flickr. I adapted “Lightning Crashes” by ~Prescott under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. The banner can be re-used and/or modified under the same terms.
3. After a struggle for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite with Collected Editions, we’ve both been superseded by a number of high-profile blogs that have joined, including Once Upon a Geek, The Absorbascon and 4thLetter. Speed Force has been holding steady around #12 lately.
4. I’ve dropped the Recent Visitors/Viewers boxes from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. They add a lot to the download time, especially on certain browsers *cough* IE *cough* that wait until they’re loaded before displaying the main section of the page.
The news blog Voices from Krypton has invited me to do a weekly Flash column. I’ll be writing a round-up of the week’s events. I’ll also be cross-posting my reviews of the Flash issues, at least for now.
When I launched this blog, I did several things in order to promote it. I added it to my forum signatures. I took blogs that I read occasionally and made them regular reads, and started using this URL when commenting. And I submitted the site to some relevant blog directories.
I found Comic Blog Elite through Collected Editions. Speed Force started off fairly low in rank (in part because it started late in the day, so the daily averages were pulled down by that first day with only 1 or 2 hours), but it’s been slowly climbing up the ranks. I figured it would eventually settle around #5 or so.
Amazingly, for the last few days, Speed Force and Collected Editions have been vying for the #3 spot.
Wow!
Here’s a big thank-you to everyone who’s been reading!