This Week's Sneak Pitch

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) has been talking about overhauling its website for several years, and finally did so at the beginning of this month.

The issue became more pressing earlier this year as the old site creaked and groaned beneath the weight of the thousands of cartoons AAEC members had uploaded to it over the years. Lately, members and visitors would be greeted by a screen blank except for the words "Service Unavailable," especially in the morning when many of us were trying to upload files.

The new site still some bugs to be worked out; my cartoon last week never showed up on the home page, possibly because the default setting for uploads was for unknown reasons set to "private" at some point. The black elements of my cartoons are translating on the new site to raw umber, so I suppose I'll have to switch to uploading RGB (screen-friendly red-green-blue) files instead of CMYK (print-friendly cyan-magenta-yellow-black) ones.

The list of members lists us alphabetically by first name instead of last name, which I find disappointing, and not just because I get pushed back from the front of the alphabet to the middle. Like most cartoonists, I don't sign cartoons with my first name, so there's no reason for most readers to look for me under "P."

One consequence of the AAEC website change, unfortunate for this here website particularly, is that all the links to cartoons at the old site are dead. For years, I used the embedded link from this site to cartoons on the AAEC site instead of just inserting cartoons directly. You would see a box that looked something like this:

...which took you to my cartoon on the AAEC site. (Don't bother clicking there to view; the image is not a link.)

I stopped using those AAEC links early last year because the host of this here website kept complaining that EditorialCartoonists.com "contains HTTP resources which may cause mixed content affecting security and user experience if blog is viewed over HTTPS." Unfortunately, that leaves about nine years worth of my posts that show this sort of thing:

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒Aug 25, 2016 EditorialCartoonists.com

...and no cartoon. (Again, don't click there to view. Blogger is still upset about the now non-existent website's HTTP resources, and I wouldn't want to spoil your user experience.)

So anyway, I'm in the process of replacing all those old, defunct links with cartoon images. While most visitors here visit only the most current posts, there are a few old posts that still get page views from time to time.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I'm working on the problems, and they should all be fixed soon.