An Experimental Life

Well now you've got your space online, so you have to upload some comics, get your website built, and get your update script running.

Again, this is a basic webcomic tutorial, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about how to build your site. I'm just going to say for starters to keep it simple. The script package, WalrusRev, with which I am about to hook you up, requires hardly any work at all, and not much knowledge of HTML. WalrusREV is based on the Walrus 2.9 by Jim Newberry, but there were a few broken things there, so I fixed what I could and worked around what I couldn't.

Get WalrusRev at
walrusREV1.zip

To see this version in action, go to the demo. (Note that when you download WalrusRev, your copy will NOT have ads.)

It has everything you need to get started, including an automated archive page. One of us plans to add an RSS feature to it eventually, but you can still do RSS feeds a number of other ways. (If you don't know what RSS is, don't worry. It isn't essential--just nice, and there are several other options, which I'll add later.) If you want to modify it or do other tricks with your site, never fear--Webmonkey is an excellent resource, as are Sam's Teach Yourself HTML books.

If you elect to go with a different comic update script than Walrus, just follow the instructions they give you with it.

At this point you have your comic up and running. Congratulations! You could soon become a webcomic dozenaire like us! Read on to the next section to learn how to start building a readership. (if you don't want a readership, why are you reading this? Just stick your comics in a drawer someplace.)

Note:
Walrus is a perfectly fine way to run your comic, and I was happy with it for a year and a half until I decided I wanted closer integration between the comic and non-comic portions of the site, the ability to give different levels of users varying permissions (like the ability to not see ads for certain users), etc.

I've switched BCK to Drupal (the world's best open source CMS), a complete PHP and MySQL CMS (content management system), and will have a seperate tutorial on that eventually. To run a webcomic well requires the addition of a few third-party modules and some code-tweaking by hand, not to mention that Drupal requires a bit more in the way of system resources than most solutions.