Forum Federato

Comicfury appears to be down, but yesterday I uploaded the latest updates for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan to the self-hosted site at

https://www.reinderdijkhuis.com

The webcomic king will continue! Nothing will stop me! Bwa ha ha!

#Webcomic #Fantasy

I'm really glad I don't have to watch Apple Events for work anymore.

Y'know, if "AI" uses insanely advanced probabilistic computations to get wrong answers to basic sums, that doesn't just say something about "AI" ("It make computer bad at math"), but also about the usefulness of insanely advanced probabilistic computations.

I would love to support my brother and my ex-bandmate's new release but… their singer is not real. It's a vocaloid.

And… that's not strictly where I draw the line; these things have been around since before LLMs. But I just don't have the desire to promote them either.

Patreon has introduced a draggable paywall, which is actually a little bit useful.

No news on whether the italics bug that shows up under Safari has been fixed.

@oblomov Pain in the ass to use on larger archives unless you pay for incremental exports, though.

Actually, that's the worst part of the Wordpress ecosystem: so many things are free-until-indispensible.

@oblomov Not built-in, but you can get plugins.

@eishiya I'm kind of in the same place, at least for some things. I wouldn't want to hand-code a new site for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and started to get away from that by the time that reached 100 episodes (it's at over 1200 now); for something like that, I need automation and cross-referencing, and Wordpress* fits that need best.
But for a new project, like a gag comic with a (honestly) short life expectancy, hand-coding is a better option.

* with static exports, no live instance online.

@paulzwalker Sure, but what we want is more amateurs doing this for themselves.

One thing I keep running into with any form of self-hosting:
STARTING it is every bit as easy as promotors of self-hosting claim it is. Yeah, spinning up a Wordpress instance is easy and rewarding, as is writing a bit of HTML by hand, or any other solution really.

CONTINUING to do it, while maintaining and securing whatever solution you're using, is hard.

Gonna stop here because it's past midnight. I've already got further than I did when I just spun up a Wordpress instance and tried to make that into a site that I liked. Er, nothing against Wordpress as a tool, but it wasn't right for what I wanted to do, which is a simple brochure website. It got in my way, dealing with themes was a faff, and I wasn't enjoying the process.

All right, moving on to HTML5 tags. I didn't know these yet.

Oh, and mental note, there's an artist on Comicfury who's read all the docs and has customised their site in great detail, which is another thing I would like to do.
(comic contains a lot of nudity)
https://ytholand.the-comic.org/comics/

Aw man, the course goes straight to using a CSS framework! Ah well.

Anyway, the way I'm doing this, typing in an editor, uploading through sftp, and so on, feels just like being back in uni and/or my first nerd job, which also involved a bit of website coding. Just like the good old days.

I'm a little ahead of the course when it comes to organising files, because I remember how important that was.
Good, good. So far, nothing is strictly new, I'm just pretending to be a beginner.

Now, I expect that making it look fancy will present some difficulties, as CSS, unlike HTML, is pretty complex and fiddly. But I am thinking about structure now, content next, looks later.

Like, *of course* I'm going to have a page about copy-editing, one about translation and one about writing. And maybe one about terms and conditions, how to contact, and so on. The path just shows itself.

And of course, compared to any Wordpress site, it'll be *lean*. There will be nothing there that I didn't put there myself.

I've decided to just go ahead and hand-code my business website from scratch, using Bluefish and other open-source tools. Because it's been years since I've done this and I've never written HTML5 from scratch, I'm using HTMLforPeople as a refresher:
https://htmlforpeople.com/

This website is going to be limited in size and won't have to update much, so it's great for doing it this way. And I'm already finding that this forces me to think about what I actually want & how to structure.