Of the Dumbrella crew, we'll have Andy Bell, r stevens, Sam Brown, and Jon Rosenberg there. But also joining us this year will be MC Frontalot, Meredith Gran, Chris Yates, Scott McCloud, and Wil Wheaton. So this promises to be a pretty crazy year.

Of course, with one week left to when I fly, I still need to get the PoS system set up, check that the booth-cam is working, and make sure everyone has badges. Procrastination is a cruel mistress.

According to Dave (update: and now Brad), they're pretty much sold out of How To Make Webcomics . I was hoping to pick one of these up in San Diego, where I could get all 4 artists to scribble in it. I hope that's still an option.

Since 2 of the authors are clients, I'm pretty excited that it's doing well.

My first job from college (actually helped start, and got credit for it as a senior project) was as the original programmer for theglobe.com.

I remember long hours back in the CS lab at Cornell getting our version of web based chat (one of only 3 at the time )running on our PowerMac 6100 pizza box machines. And the random outages we had whenever we decided to play a networked game of Marathon.

Check them out!

I'm a little late getting around to posting this, but my latest client is Brad Guigar, talented creator of Evil Inc..

Due to the lack of a better excuse, I'm going to say that the delay is because I thought that this announcement was really best scheduled for Halloween, given his comic's theme and color scheme.

I encourage you to jump on over, read through his archives, and let us know about any bugs you find.

Internationalization isn't something I've really had to deal with before. Trust Greg Dean to force my hand.

For most of my hosted sites, it's not an issue. The templating is entirely under the creators' control, so if they want to be in French, German, Canadian, or whatever, then most of the work is just making sure that their templates are in the right language.

However, parts of the site that are "functional" (registration/log-in, forums, etc), tend to be auto-generated, and that's where problems start.

I have some ideas of how to get this working on a larger basis, and have done the minimal research to get an idea of what best practices are. The big thing with the launch of Greg's german site, was that I had to have timestamps, for both his strips and his rants to auto-generate in the right language.

Luckily, at some point in the past couple of years, I had decided to standardize all my date manipulation on the perl DateTime module. This was great when I started setting Greg up initially, and also when Dave Kellett moved over, because midnight too these Californians (for comic updating) is apparently a few hours off from my east coast sensibilities.

DateTime also has built in, and easy, support for Locales. I had already started to throw together support for that, knowing that whatever solution I ended up with would have some basis in that area, but little did I know that a simple function call, right when my "site" variables are being created would automatically make all dates show up correctly for all page rendering.

It's so nice when something that looks to be a pain in the ass just suddenly "works". And more importantly, let's me delay implementing all the other hard bits for another day.