Can anybody give me a few shortcuts about keeping my website up-to-date? It's just such a bitch creating new pages every few days....I'd like put up a weeks worth at once but then you lose the draw of people going back every few days.
I'd rather focus my time on the writing and art but find myse;lf spending hours a week on the site!
I wrote a PHP Script that dynamically displays the strip for a given day. Now all I do is name the strip for the day I want it to appear and drop it in a directory. I spend no time on site maintenance unless I want to change the look and feel or add functionality.
[quote:ab60a59960="Anonymous"]Programs like Dreamweaver can help with this but it's easy enough to do in HTML.
Okay, am I the only one who gets irritated by this sort of thing? Dreamweaver generates HTML. It's not as though the application were, in and of itself, a proprietary markup language.
(Okay, yes, I know: a) it can generate some things which aren't markup languages at all, such as CSS, and you can kick it into generating non-XHTML XML if you want; b) there's a rich mine of pedantry in to be had in discussing whether one should distinguish XHTML and prior specifications. But...)
Bah! A manly man would make their site with notepad alone! You are all week! Conan The Barbarian would mock you!
Notepad? By crum, you sully Conan the Barbarian's name with such nonsense! A true artist should carve it in stone and hurl each tablet at passerby should they draw near. That'd teach 'em to complain about an update not being on time... (grumble)
Actually, Conan would carve it in the chests of his fallen enemies, but thats just details I guess.
Hex! I demand you to write it in Hex!
better yet! Binary!
Shake that electrons, baby!!! (o^o^)o
Manly men use neither tablets nor notepad.
Manly men and bitchy bitches use their favourite vi-clone. Or, if they're sheepshaggers as well, emacs.
Notepad. Sheesh.
(What am I? Er. Well, I press escape every time I'm done with text input, and try to delete things with x and dd...)
[quote:d26726e996="Wednesday"]Manly men use neither tablets nor notepad.
Manly men and bitchy bitches use their favourite vi-clone. Or, if they're sheepshaggers as well, emacs.
Notepad. Sheesh.
(What am I? Er. Well, I press escape every time I'm done with text input, and try to delete things with x and dd...)
I use vi to nip and tuck my code when I find a bug and am away from home, but I actually do my coding in Gedit or Nedit. What sort of farm animal do I shag?
I'm a graphical 'n easy kind of guy. I recognize that when I use Linux, I look for something that feels like windows, only without the blue screens of death, therefore, my kind of editor Kwrite is (even if I can't say the same about chicago regarding cities, as I've never been there)
[quote:5caa18f48a="William_Beckerson"]You can put everything you have online at once. No one can see it until you add the links.
Erm... careful. For those who use a predictable naming convention (e.g. yyyymmdd-stripname.gif), rabid viewers most definitely can preview what they haven't yet linked. This is especially a problem for folks using less-than-well-thought-out comic automation systems.
As to the original question, I do it both ways; I use automation for my regular strip, but am doing the backstory "digital comic book" in hand-crafted HTML because its pages are broken down into individual panels whose size and positition vary from page to page. The HTML isn't that much of a hassle, but unless one is using a restrictive Webhost that doesn't allow/support CGI, php, whatever, I'd say try automation. It's quick and easy to set up, you only have to do that ONCE, and from then on it's just uploading your comics at whatever rate and with whatever buffer you want (the aforementioned caution kept in mind, of course).
Cheers,
James
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Can anybody give me a few shortcuts about keeping my website up-to-date? It's just such a bitch creating new pages every few days....I'd like put up a weeks worth at once but then you lose the draw of people going back every few days.
I'd rather focus my time on the writing and art but find myse;lf spending hours a week on the site!
If you take one of my strips, like The Sapphire Claw, when I create a new strip I put it onto the main page in place of the previous strip. I then tweak the previous strip page so that the "next" link points to a page I will create shortly and save it. I then take that page tweak it so it now has the next to last strip on it and the links point to the right places and then save it as the next archive page in the series. The beauty of doing it this way is that I can do an update in a couple of minutes.
I dunno, I update mine with simple html. It usually takes me about 10 minutes to 1/2 hour to update, dependnig on how much material I'm putting up. I find that setting up a simple system and using lots of copy and paste helps a lot >_<
Also the only thing I change in my updates are the page numbers in the html on the main page and the archives so in the end it really doesn't take that long since all I'm really changing is a number. I'm sure there's an automated way to do this, I'm just too lazy to figure it out -_-;;
I'm using a cold fusion database. All I need to do is sign in to an administration page, change the current comic and update my news section if I've got something to say.
Comic update takes about 2 minutes (if that).
News update, a little longer for typing purposes but thats it.
-bry
Yeah, I use Html and a strick naming system. That way, I copy comic0xx's archive page, change the numbers in the links and post.
I've even set up just a bunch of empty archive pages. Sometimes you can tell I did it because you get things like Last week's link to Comic033 that went to nowhere.
There's a bunch of archiving scripts in the links section here that would speed things up - most of them are not too hard to set up and we set up a forum here to try to help people with setting them up.
Yeah, what my esteemed cohort said. ^_^
Depending upon how much you do. I find that it's easy enough to just copy a previous page, change the links, title and text. Add your comic and save. Takes about 3 minutes for a page. Programs like Dreamweaver can help with this but it's easy enough to do in HTML.
In the three years since I've been comicking, I've taught myself HTML at my own pace; while now I'd consider myself fairly adept at it, even at the beginning, I never found it that difficult to upload new pages/comics (even before I started using an automatic updater).
Essentially, the guest above me says it well: what you do is create a basic template that you use for your archived pages. All you have to change on each page is the text and links to dates (if you use "previous" and "next" buttons, even better -- all you have to change are the links), and any custom text you've chosen to include for that day.
In fact, that's what I'm doing now with each update of my comic. While Keenspot has an auto-updater, my current storyline uses a completely different page template than my normal archive template, which means that I have to manually update the archive pages each time I add a new comic. But it only takes me about a minute to change the date links.
It's a simple as that. ^_^
[quote:4c483fd7c3="Anonymous"]Depending upon how much you do. I find that it's easy enough to just copy a previous page, change the links, title and text. Add your comic and save. Takes about 3 minutes for a page. Programs like Dreamweaver can help with this but it's easy enough to do in HTML.
This is exactly what I do.
And Pines: You can put everything you have online at once. No one can see it until you add the links. Which is a few minutes of work at most. That way you can go back and "update" every few days and no one will be the wiser. That's what I did with my international hit series "R3" :wink: