So, this evening, I was visiting my comic page in preparation of uploading a new comic page, and was taken aback to find broken placeholder images in place of the expected navigation buttons. The same issue applied to all the off-site hosted images on my Characters and Links pages.

As it turns out, the image-hosting provider that I've used for many years, Tinypic.com, is closing its doors, and all of the outstanding images are no longer available for use. I had until September 16 to log into my account there and download all the saved images, one-by-one. So, that's exactly what I did. I have now moved all my images to a hosting provider that I hope will be around for a long time.

While I was replacing all the broken images on my Links page, I took the time to do a bit of housecleaning on all the links, removing any that led to pages that were not the same as the websites I originally affiliated with. Now I'm down to just 7 current links -- I suppose that's a consequence of outliving many of the websites I once affiliated with.

Anyhow, I invite you all to check out the updated Links page. If you used to be one of my affiliates and I removed your link in error, or if you're someone new and would like to link-swap with my comic website, send me an email at STP(at)MobianChaos.com, with the subject line "Affiliation," and we'll open up discussions.

Some of my long-time readers might remember I used to publish these comics on an independent website (STPcomics.net) before I moved here. While I'm still using SmackJeeves as my comic host, I now, once again, have a top-level domain that goes to my comic: MobianChaos.com!

(Odd as this sounds, it was an impulse buy. Today I learned that domain registrar GoDaddy.com had a sale on .com domains, making them just $0.99 for the first year.)

At this point, it's only a forwarding domain, i.e. entering that URL simply redirects to the actual location of the comic. I am aware that SmackJeeves has a Premium comic option which would allow me to actually host the comic under the domain name, but that would cost me $60 a year and I don't know if I want to spend that.

Well...here it is. What started as a little project when I was in high school, my desire to "run with the big dogs" and make a Sonic the Hedgehog sprite comic, has now reached its tenth anniversary today! Uploading a new comic almost every Friday since April 22, 2005, I have reached a milestone to which I've looked forward for years.

In honor of the occasion, I've put together a short movie describing the characters of my web comic, and a fast montage showing all of the 476 issues that have been published to date. In all that time, I've learned a fair bit about what goes into a successful sprite comic, as well as refined my techniques for making one.

You can watch the video on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG9NyBhhSw0

EDIT: I've also, for the first time in years, created a new top banner for the comic, which also notes its ten-year anniversary.