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If you've been a fan of EGS for a while now, then you've had to deal with the dreaded "the comics going to be late" news posts. If you've been reading EGS for a considerably long time, then you might remember the good old days when the story would update every weekday. My current goal, extreme though it may be, is to do away with the need for those dreaded news posts, and to make the story schedule more frequent. This can be accomplished with a mighty buffer. In case you're uninformed, what I mean by "buffer" is any comics made in advance. If the next story comic is Tuesday and I have a comic made the previous Saturday, I would have a small buffer going, as the comic for Tuesday would be guaranteed on time. If the comic is done days before the due date, what are the odds of my putting up a news post saying the comic will be late? Short of a technical difficulty, none. Creating and maintaining a buffer isn't easy, and the real irony is that a buffer is easier to maintain once a healthy-sized buffer has been already made. I've been making comics the day before they're due, and that's not how you get a buffer going. Due to my schedule, I haven't had days off to just make comics and not post them, so I haven't had a really good opportunity to get an actual buffer up and running. There'll be a brief period coming up when I won't be posting new story comics, so that'll be a great opportunity to get this going. One of the major benefits of the buffer is the ability to update more frequently with less stress, but a buffer is an easy thing to lose, so I'm planning a sort of probation system for the schedule. If I have at least eight comics in the buffer as of the update time for the Monday of the week, then that week would have five comics, Monday-Friday. If there is less than eight comics in the buffer, then it would only have three comics, giving me an opportunity that week to revive the buffer to a point where it will remain a decent buffer. While eight comics will be the minimum to have five comics in a week, the minimum amount of comics in the buffer for the first week of five comics will be higher than eight. To be more precise, this whole probation schedule won't start unless there are twelve comics in the buffer. The logic behind this is that with twelve comics in the buffer, I can have as many as three weeks where I only make three comics per week but still have five comics for those weeks. The math behind this is rather simple:
WEEK 1: 12 Comic Buffer - 5 Comics Used + 3 Comics Made = 10 As you can see, I only really get myself into trouble in week 4 should I only make three comics every week, but the buffer doesn't dwindle to nothing. It starts week 4 with six in the buffer, and it ends week 4 with six in the buffer. All I have to do is make five comics in one week to get it back up to eight for a five comic week, but should I fail to do so, there's still a decent buffer, and there's still three comics a week. In fact, had I made five comics during any of the first 3 weeks and three comics the other two, I would've had five comics for week 4. Starting with twelve gives a lot of "wiggle room", and gives me three weeks to really get with the program. Should I adopt this system, I won't announce on the site how big the buffer is. My goal is to reduce pressure, and that would add to it. What I will do is announce with the update on Monday whether if it will be a three-day week. Assuming five comics becomes the norm, no news will be good news, meaning if I don't say anything in the news, it would be assumed that there would be five comics that week. The only annoying thing about this from a technical standpoint will be my having to rename the comics depending on buffer size (they have to be given names by date for the automated Keenspot system), but that's a minor annoyance on my part, and won't affect any bunnies. To summarize: I'm working on a buffer of story comics, AKA making story comics in advance. Once I have 12 comics in the buffer at the start of a week (Monday), I'll start having story comics Monday-Friday. If I have less than 8 comics in the buffer at the start of a week, I will only have comics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that week, giving me a chance to rebuild the buffer. |
The Story Buffer