4/8 Randall Munroe of XKCD at Borderlands Books, San Francisco, 2009 09 23 Part 4

Randall Munroe on a book tour, with a surprise appearance at Borderlands. The technical operation of the site and the site's history.

Summarizing:

(duplicating some of the stuff from part 3: Buttercup Festival)

Who's this "we"? Derek is the sysadmin/business person; he avoids public appearances; he took over business stuff because Randall's not so good at it; he pushes merch and stuff.

Originally Derek was the guy he called who had a server. Originally it was hosted on a Pentium 1 off a cablemodem in his parents' house under the table in the kitchen next to where the dog slept; this was in 2006. [actually 2005. --Azz]

It was first intended to share with a few friends; a friend sent to a friend, the one that started circulating was http://xkcd.com/10/ (starts the book); he got an IM from someone who wanted to put it on his website; it was Cory Doctorow: is that OK? BOINGBONG. Vs. the server under the table next to the dog, some random linux distro he didn't know how to use.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/01/pi-joke.html

TIME TO CALL DEREK. "There's a kind of nerd who has an attitude about things like that, that's sort of like: I'm sure that you're going to explain this later, but I'm sure it's important, so let's see if we can make that happen. ... I could call him up and say listen I need a helicopter to land at these coordinates; and I don't know that he would be able do it, but he would try with no questions asked."

He got it set up with the files, prepared for the bandwidth. The navigation was a mess: he spent a lot of time setting up browsing for new readers, there was a lot of traffic -- but he hadn't put the page live. But he got the readers and scanned & drew more.

Derek called about the hosting: you're not using the bandwidth: I set up all this bandwidth; I thought you said there was a hosting *challenge* here: I'm going to take down your hosting if you're not going to use it.

Randall rose to the occasion; Derek coded it. The site runs on a flat text file with the comic title, file name, title text, any links, special news. Pages are generated from this file.

BoingBoing created a few thousand visitors, and then there were some regular readers. He realized he could get readers by trolling Slashdot: putting the link in his signature.

He was frustrated with the flaws in the moderation system, but realized he could exploit it: it favors things that are there first. (Continued in part 5)

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• xkcd
• Randall
• Munroe
• Borderlands
• Books
• comics
• San
• Francisco