Wabber has just completed its 2 year hibernation cycle and is now revamped and ready to roll. A brief sabbatical to work can only last so long.

For all you sufferers of Work Avoidance Behaviour, you’ll be pleased to know that The Guru’s Llama Courier service is finally up and galloping, and efficiently so. Like with all-bran flakes, you can now expect more regular updates, and many replies to our exclusive Wabber Ask the Guru feature.

Further, in terms of an update, a few of the anticipated cartoon strips that never happened: viz. Harvey Whartbanger, Idle Minds, Casino Pigs, etc will likely be canned as focus will be on aggregating the best cartoons off the web and our very own The Guru cartoon strip.

If you spot some good comics anywhere on the web, please do drop us a line – if it fits within our Work Avoidance theme, we will ask their permission to republish the best of their work here. In the meantime, please do help spread the word and do sign up (on the right) to receive free Wabber cartoon posts by email.

So now that the platform is up, I will be adding some counters and measures. I need to record the number of unique visitors on Wabber, which posts are the most popular, and most importantly how many people laughed. I’m thinking most likely I will put it up as a poll that will be displayed on all posts. Users will only be allowed to vote once though – that may be tricky to monitor without recording email addresses or something of the sort which is a real pain any true wabber will not do. Suggestions are most welcome.

The number of posts, comments etc is quite easily obtainable from the WordPress backend so that’s not a problem. I will also be installing tracking codes from a number of blogging platforms including Technorati, Blogrankings, Afrigator, and Amatomu – the more the merrier. I will also track usage using Google Analytics but I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to integrate the site with Adsense as yet – I will most likely not in the short term anyway.

Still remaining to be done are all things related to the RSS feed management. I use Google’s Feedburner application on the Wonkie cartoon blog and will most likely use the same platform for distributing new posts by email to subscribers for Wabber.

Slowly but surely it’s all getting there!

Ok so things are moving along nicely – the names of the various strips have been identified and the core platform is more or less up and running now. The names of the strips and the subjects they cover are as follows:

Bash It All – All about anger and frustration at everything from the workplace to services
Casino Pigs – Poker, gambling and related vices
Harvey Whartbanger – MBA related cartoons and humour
nET yOUR cATCH – The lighter side of singledom and online dating
ze Guru – Cartoons with Spiritual and religious themes
Stat – Medical industry related cartoons
Idle Minds – something about a 4 year old but haven’t figured it all out yet
General – General Comic Fun

Building on the success of Wonkie, I decided to launch this blog, Wabber.com, that broadened the horizons of Wonkie from mostly political and social satire. Wabber is designed to include a number of different cartoon strips covering some pretty diverse subjects: workplace humour; medical related laughs, MBA and more business related humour; cartoons on spiritual and religious aspects (and no we will not be publishing any Mohammed cartoons to raise our profile but thanks for the innovative suggestion!); gambling and poker gags; and finally a strip looking at the lighter side of the single life and online dating.

A few people have asked why Wabber? Besides sounding like a fun site to visit – there is actually some deep meaning behind the term. It is derived from the word wab which is an acronym for Work Avoidance Behaviour. That makes wabbing the act of avoiding work and wabber obviously a person who is avoiding work. I wanted to create a fun site for people to kill some time and have a few laughs.

The design needs a bit more work but I think it’s enough to get going. There is a platform in place that allows multiple strips on a single site – something that was a little more difficult to do with the ComicPress theme Wonkie was based on. So I’ll leave the fanciness for later and get cracking with the toons as soon as the basics are up and running. More soon…

Somewhere on my list of things to do before I die I scribbled down that I wanted to make a million people laugh. I figured that would be quite an entertaining little landmark for myself. As luck would have it when I started a new venture last year with some ex-colleagues from university, one of the ideas I had for a viral marketing campaign will help a lot with this goal.

We developed a platform on JustOneSite that allowed users to create their own cartoons for free and then email it to their friends. The emailed cartoon would be placed into a marketing frame for JustOneSite so awareness of the site and its offering would be increased. It turns out that making cartoons isn’t quite as easy as it looked. While we did witness some pretty good ones from JustOneSite users, there weren’t enough decent cartoons made for the concept to really go viral.

One of the happy side-effects of the JustOneSite project however was that I discovered I had some talent for making cartoons. In October last year, I created a cartoon blog for myself called Wonkie CartOOns!. Wonkie has grown well over the last 8 months and even was ranked as having the best post on a South African blog written in 2008 in the annual SA blogging awards (Click Bring me the head of Kgalema Motlanthe to read that post).