Hey there, rubifruits.

Alas, with the economy in the pooper, my surgery looming on the horizon, and our hosting costs spiraling ever upward, I am having to close the Rubifruit Exchange. It's just not a sustainable model, and I can't afford to keep it going. I've spoken with several hosting companies about our requirements and CPU usage, and it's just not affordable.

It was great while it lasted, and I hope the exchange helped people make new friends and discover new comics. Who knows, maybe when my surgery is out of the way and I have a disposable income, we can set the exchange up again. Or maybe I'll do something entirely different with the site, like host a womens' comicking collective. Who can say.

The site will be up for a little while longer. I'll be shutting it down within a week, though.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Recently Rubifruit has been experiencing record traffic. That's great news for you guys! More exposure than ever!

However, we're eating up our processors over at Dreamhost, making the cost of hosting with them spiral well beyond my means. In an effort to keep service running smoothly and to continue serving you, the exchange participants, we've changed the exchange ratios so that for every two clicks generated by the banners on your site, your banner will be shown until it is clicked once on other sites. This is less intensive for the server than our old ration, which was that one click got you 400 impressions. We still feel that this will keep large, high traffic/low click sites from swamping the banner rotation while ensuring that those sites that do encourage users to click the banners will get exposure for their efforts.

We'll keep an eye on the numbers and let you know what happens! And please, don't forget that you can now buy extra clicks from your control panel!

Hi there!

In an effort to help pay for hosting costs, we've made it possible for exchange participants to buy clicks and impressions for their ads.

How to buy clicks:
Sign in and visit http://exchange.rubifruit.com/user.php
Click on "Buy Clicks and Impressions" for the ad size you'd like to promote
Select the package you want to buy from the drop down.
Pay with paypal.

It's that easy!

Thank you to everyone who replied to our blog entry asking for pricing feedback. We've set up a pricing schematic that we hope will satisfy the most people. But please feel free to contact us at any time with your suggestions and feedback. Please let us know if there is any trouble at rubifruit at gmail dawt com

Thanks again for your continued support of Rubifruit, the banner exchange by/for/about girls and women.


Rachel Nabors

Well, the new private server is working fantastically! No more down times and smooth sailing all the way, yo. But, Rubifruit now costs about $50 a month to host. Much as I love keeping the site going out of the goodness of my heart, it's a still a large chunk of change to wave bye to every month.

So we're going to activate users' abilities to buy more air time for their ads. But before I start setting that up, I would like to ask you guys a few questions. Please reply! Rubifruit needs your input!

1. Would you purchase extra impressions or clicks to try to boost traffic to your site?

2. Which would you prefer to buy, impressions (being the number of times your ad is displayed on participating sites), or clicks (being the number times your ad gets clicked on by a visitor, meaning it would be shown over and over again until the predetermined number of people click on it--naturally a more expensive option, but a more reliable one)?

3. How much you would you pay for 100 clicks? 1000 impressions?

I recently was given a very nice job as graphic designer for an web media/advertising company. To celebrate this good fortune, I've moved Rubifruit to a (more expensive) private server. We'll see how it goes! Now that I have a dependable income, I won't have to choose between paying for hosting and paying rent.

Thank you all for your patience with the rolling site-outtages! I didn't like them, either, but my hands were tied financially.

Happy comicking!

I worked with the banner script's creator to remove some features we weren't using that may have been causing some extra server load. Let's hope that the exchange will stop blipping out now!

I also noticed that the back end of the site was looking kind of funky and fixed that up as well.

Please let us know if there are any problems!

Hey guys,

Apparently we are hosting so many banners and impressions that even Dreamhost is having problems with all our activity. The site will be up and down for awhile while we get this sorted out.

If we have to move to a more expensive server, I'll be opening up pay-for-impressions to help cover hosting costs. What do you think about that? Good idea? Bad idea?

Some of you may have noticed Rubifruit was "down" for awhile. It actually had been moved to exchange.rubifruit.com in order to make room on rubifruit.com for us to start building a web comic hosting solution. The links and exchange kept working, but if you visited rubifruit.com instead of rubifruit.com/exchange, you would see Wordpress Mu being hacked. However, that project is currently on hold, and we have temporary forwards in place to point everyone to exchange.rubifruit.com.

Please update the code and links on your sites to reflect this change, for we cannot guarantee that they will keep working when the forwards come down.

We apologize for any confusion this may have caused!

Now, let's talk about R-rated Comics
The other day I received a complaint from a G-rated children's comic that a banner showing on her site lead to a site with warnings of adult content. I checked the link, and indeed, someone had put this site in G, PG, and R comics categories. Figuring they must have misunderstood, I edited their categories and dropped them a quick note to let them know what had happened and request they not do it again.

And they sent me a long snippy letter about how nudity is not R-rated.

Let me break some important stuff down for anyone who isn't with the program yet:
1. We have a G-category to keep the kiddies in the kiddie pool and out of the adult swim. I personally don't care is you have naked men playing with each other's genitals all over your site, but a parent might get really pissed about it and take it out on the childrens' comic site unfortunate enough to get caught carrying that banner.

Hence, any material a parent might find offensive, even if hidden behind warning signs, does not belong in the G-rated category. This is for the best of the entire exchange.

2. Being a part of this exchange is a privilege, not a right. It's foolish to argue with the admins when you've done something to endanger other people's sites. Signing up does not guarantee your place here. We reject people for having poor content and bad attitudes as well as doing things that jeopardize others' readerships.

3. That said, after trying to wade through this long rebuttal, I felt that the person writing it couldn't be trusted to properly categorize their comics in the future, and I removed their account so that this will never happen again.


In the future, I will make it extra super apparent that anything a parent might not approve of cannot go in the G category.

CLARIFICATION: Homosexual characters and love stories that don't involve sexual situations are fine in the G-category. Even if some people might get upset over that, we believe in fostering acceptance through media and feel that there is nothing perverse, deviant or unwholesome about homosexuality. If any site owners do not feel this way, perhaps they need to find a more narrow-minded exchange. Just in case anyone was curious about it.

Thank you for your patience with the site moving. And do welcome some of our awesome new members!

Thanks to everyone who reported a bug on the links listing page. The links are now all working perfectly, and you can check out all the awesome rubifruits! So grab your beverage of choice and sit back for a couple hours of webcomics surfing.

We've added a 117 by 30 pixel button to the sizes you can choose from now. Even if you don't display that size, you should upload one so it can appear on sites that choose to display the button code. Did you know that you can transfer impressions between banners? Check it out under Manage Resources on your Control Panel when you sign in!

After a solid week of hard work, the Rubifruit Exchange is up and running. Join now! The boots command it!

What is the Rubifruit Exchange?
It's a banner exchange that features comics by/for/about women (and more!).

Why should I join?
Because you will be cross-promoting your site with every other participating site. That's good for everybody.

Can anyone join?
Yes. And no. We at Rubifruit reserve the right to reject submissions of stupid content, like stories about large-breasted super-powered heroines. We also like to go out of our way to badger people we think are super awesome to join.

Can boys play, too?
Yes, so long as they meet one of the following criteria:
1. Have a strong female element in their creations
2. Have a large female fan base (Trent Reznor, for instance, could totally join this exchange)
3. Consider themselves a feminist
4. Have become a woman

How does it work?
You join. You upload a banner. You get a code. You put that code on your site. It displays the banners of other Rubifruiters. When someone clicks one of those banners, you get 200 or so impressions, that is to say, your banner appears 200 times on someone else's site(s).

What sort of sites do you want?
We currently have categories for the following:
Comics for Adults (R)
Comics for Everyone (G)
Comics for Teens (PG)
Communities
Galleries/Portfolios
News/Editorials/Blogs
Podcasts

We're also open to suggestions on new categories. These categories also let you decide what kind of sites are shown in rotation on your site.

What sizes of banners do you use/accept?
We have button, box, and banner sizes available. You can also upload multiple sizes.


After becoming unemployed, I set straight to work making this site using the skills I learned. I'm still tweaking the user-end, though, so let me know if there's anything you feel needs fixing or changing.

I'm very excited that we have finally gone live. I've been wanting to do this for so long. There have been many women-positive collectives online, but the problem with those is that they can only promote so many people at once. The Rubifruit Exchange lets everyone have a chance to see and be seen. So many incredible talents have already signed up! If you don't have a site but you know someone who belongs here please send them to rubifruit.com/exchange.

Look, we have an LJ!
For future updates on the Rubifruit Exchange, do consider following our LJ.

What's in the future for Rubifruit.com and the Rubifruit Exchange?
Rubifruit.com has some big things coming up. I don't know how long it will take me, but I can say that it will be a great place for female comickers to show their stuff. The Exchange is just one piece of a greater whole. But because it is for others, I felt this part was the most important piece to put up first.

Expect the user end of the Exchange to undergo some polishing. I also hope to add a feature to let users cheaply buy impressions (thus paying for the exchange's server-intensive hosting). I am researching all sorts of things that could turn the Exchange into a real promotion powerhouse, like a Facebook app that would randomly display a banner and a link to a Rubifruit comic, or better yet, one that alerts fans when a new comic has been posted.

But for now, it does what I meant it to do: cross-promote sites run by awesome people, sites I wish every one of my readers could visit.

This is our first bit of news. We have two sizes of banners for you to choose from now, a 125 pixel square in addition to our 468 by 60 pixel banner. Also, this post comes to you directly from our new Livejournal via rss, which you can subscribe to for updates on our site and banner exchange news!