I’ve been Dugg…

Over 67000 hits yesterday (yes, in ONE day).

http://digg.com/comics_animation/Anatomy_of_a_hug_COMIC_2

Again, strange as it sounds: please, do NOT digg me. Thank you.

OK, so my demands haven’t been met yet. Surprise surprise.

But as a sign of good will, I will start releasing some hostag… uhm, new cartoons in a few days. I’ve managed to scrape some inspiration from the bottom of the well, and starting Wednesday, I’ll start publishing again, if that’s okay with you.

BTW, one of my friends suggested I’d only publish on week days, and not in the weekend. Good idea or not?

Yesterday I went to Paris to meet up with Rachael, one of my very very first fans, and her husband Dale. They came all the way from Brisbane, Australia, just to meet me! Ha ha, not really They’re on a trip through Europe now, visiting among others the romantic city of Paris. Thanks to Thalys train, Paris is just a stone’s throw away from where I live, so I thought I’d be cool to meet them there. And it was! We had a lovely time, and where lucky to pick the sunniest day of the year (so far) for a trip to places like Montmartre, including Café des Deux Moulains – the café from Amélie Poulain!, le Centre Pompidou, the Notre Dame, Musée d’ Orsay and – of course – the Eiffel Tower.

Good times

Some of you may remember my proud announcement in March about the new record my site had broken: over 50.000 visitors in a month!

Now look what happened THIS month:

Yes, that’s right: more than 100.000 unique visitors! Crikey!!

Is that spectacular? Well, yes and no. The trouble is, HALF of that number comes directly from StumbleUpon. In the last two weeks, people have been feeding several Happysad cartoons into the StumbleUpon-machinerie, causing one SU-storm on top of each other. Yesterday I got over 20.000 hits in one day, today I will easily top that, and that’s really insane. I like a bit of attention as much as the next person, but this is just over the top.

So… I know many of you have discovered my site thanks to SU, I know a lot of people would LOVE to have that much referrals to their site, etc… but PLEASE, pretty please with sugar on top, do NOT add any more cartoons to StumbleUpon! I get enough traffic as it is, thank you.

I would rather have one interested visitor looking at 700 cartoons, than 700 visitors just passing by and eating my bandwidth. Speaking of which, two last remarks. One, I know my current Happysad gallery is crap, so I’m working on a new one, which will be slightly less crap, I hope. More news about that soon. Two, now would really be a good moment to remind everyone that that little orange Paypal Donate button in the upper right corner hasn’t been used in quite a while.

Thanks,

Jeroen

Tomorrow!