» Interview - Dan Liebner, Creator of Smack Jeeves

DL: Dan's fine

DL: I was born in Germany to American parents, and a few months later moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA where I was born and raised.

DL: I will turn 19 on August 15th

DL: No, I can't boast any experience of having done a webcomic. I am more of a programmer than an artist, really. If you're wondering "then why'd you make Smack Jeeves?" I assure you there is a good answer. Well, you're probably going to ask that, aren't you?

DL: Well, I had an online friend who knew I was a programmer, and I found out that he was in need of a website that would make it easy for him to publish comics. I offered to help him, but then realized, wouldn't it be great if there was a free service that anyone could sign up for to make a webcomic website for them? I wasn't aware of any of the free hosting services that existed, so I went to work on Smack Jeeves.

DL: I'm not 100% sure on that one, actually. I know I started thinking about it towards the end of my Junior year of high school, probably around April of 2005. I designed most of the site in a notebook before actually programming any of it. I programmed chunks of it over time, and as soon as there was a version that was even slightly capable of hosting a webcomic site, I started trying to promote it. This was a shameless task of posting on various forums, including CAD’s forum, which surprisingly enough let me promote it in its own thread. (CAD has a tendency to be overly harsh in their moderating as many know)

DL: Well I started out with HTML in something like 6th grade when my friend made a website. I was jealous, so I learned how to make one too. I still remember that I learned HTML from Webmonkey.com. From there I went on to dabble in JavaScript a little bit. A couple years later, when I was a freshman in high school, I learned about PHP and MySQL and how they can be used to make websites that "do" something. Then, an online acquaintance of mine gave me some web space to learn PHP with. From there, I developed an online browser based game that was just a rip-off of another online game at the time. After doing that, I realized that I was a newbie at programming, and everything I had coded up to that point was pretty poorly designed, so I learned better standards for programming slowly over time, a little bit here and there, and not too long after I felt I mastered "good" programming techniques, I started with Smack Jeeves.

DL: It just sort of developed over time. Programming is a hobby of mine, and I sometimes program in my free time, so I added new features whenever I had free time and was willing.

DL: Well it was certainly slower than it is now. There weren't as many comics of course, so new comics usually got the attention of the majority of the community, as small as it was back then. But of course, Smack Jeeves's community has always been evolving. People are always coming and going. Now is really the first time we're starting to see some oldies coming back from their leaves, which is kind of cool.

DL: Well, Smack Jeeves' growth didn't exactly adhere to a strict pattern. In the beginning its growth was exponential. Every month yielded more visitors than the last. However, our growth seems to be leveling out of late, and growth is very slow yet fairly steady. Smack Jeeves gets about 6-7,000 unique visitors a day these days. In terms of comics, we host just about 2,500 comics that actually have comic strips to display. There are just about 6,000 users registered, 38,000 comic strips hosted, 73,000 user comments posted, 52,000 comic ratings, and 28,000 forum posts.

DL: Well, I think a lot of people like that we don't force advertising onto people, and I think lately the template system is probably making Smack Jeeves more appealing (as a lot of people really hated the default layout ) Why would someone pick Smack Jeeves over another free service? I think what it really comes down to is personal taste, which is fairly fickle in the masses. Because most comic hosting services do a fairly good job of hosting comics, but they all have their own feel to them.

DL: Well, I tried to make the incentive for donating mainly for the extra features. Of course, the free service is still nearly all-inclusive, and it isn't really necessary to donate to still benefit from the large variety of features Smack Jeeves offers. Donating does get you the icing on the cake, however. In terms of Smack Jeeves' end and what we need - Sure, it helps that people donate, because we do have to pay hosting fees. Any extra money that is left over from covering hosting fees goes to me, of course, and now that I'm starting college I'm going to need whatever I can get.

DL: I'm majoring in Electrical / Computer Engineering at Rowan University I hope Electrical Engineers don't have a bad rep from the movie Waiting…

DL: I'm going to have to say my best friend is my biggest supporter in terms of my mental well-being. I might say my parents, though they probably do more mental harm than good.

DL: I can't really say there's any one person I really look up to as a role model I'm more or less self-reliant, I suppose. I'm still sort of in that stage in my life where I'm still figuring things out for myself.

DL: Well, as long as DreamHost continues to provide reliable hosting, it’s actually not all that expensive, less than $200 per year. Of course, if I were being paid $10 an hour for all the work I put into Smack Jeeves I'd be bloody rich. It is very time consuming, at least initially, to build the website it is. Maintenance takes time of course, but the major brunt of the work is in actually writing the code that makes Smack Jeeves work.
Also, the user donations do cover the cost of hosting, and a little bit more.

DL: Well, that all depends on whether or not I'd ever have to seriously consider it for my own financial needs. I don't think I'll ever sell Smack Jeeves. If I needed the money to help pay for my college tuition, I might consider making Smack Jeeves a pay-only service. If I were to do that, I'd keep it cheap of course. But again, I would only do something like that if I absolutely needed to in order to stay in college. I've spent a lot of time working on Smack Jeeves than I would have otherwise spent working at an actual job, so I'm kind of lacking in the finances department. Plus, I don't come from a rich family, so I do have to pay a significant portion of my college expenses. Hopefully that won't be necessary.

DL: Webcomics

DL: Killer Whales

DL: hmm... I’m going to have to go with pirates... Jack Sparrow is pretty bad ass.

DL: Dogs

DL: Mice

DL: Pirates

DL: Oh no you didn’t. I'm going to say CT's spite

DL: Not anyone in particular, but I’d like to make a shoutout to the webcomic artists that make Smack Jeeves great!