Jakkal
patreon
Black Tapestries
🕑 Added 2017-11-20 17:12:58 +0000 UTC First, I hope everyone has a good week and those in the US have a happy, and safe Thanksgiving. And please don't go to Walmart on Friday. Oh god, not the Walmart*.Anyway, I wanted to ask you guys a question about BT and please be honest. I have some free time now that I intend to work on just BT but I have two options:
#1. Just work on getting comic pages done.
#2. Get the site working again.
#1 I intend to do regardless during my time this week and two weeks I'm taking off in December. So, that will happen anyway. But the number of comics I get done depends on if I do...
#2. There's over 700 BT pages. Every comic hosting site I've gone to requires you upload the pages one at a time. As you can imagine, this would be tedious as hell and require a lot of free time. But I've had several people (read: More than 5) ask me lately about getting BT up somewhere with all the pages together. (Right now it's split between ComicGen, and my DA, and some of the pages are missing in between).
Let me explain the history here. BT was originally hosted on Keenspace which became ComicGenesis. At some point, the uploader stopped working for me. I just couldn't get it to work. And their admins were pretty much AWOL. This is why it's not updating there at all.
I then put BT on my own server, using Wordpress with the Comic Press plugin. Anyone that's ever had the displeasure of working with Wordpress will tell you what a horrific piece of shit it is. It's easily hacked, spammed to hell, and breaks all the time. It requires constant supervision for updates, and even when it updates on its own, it breaks stuff. Around May of this year, BT's wordpress installation (The very same one Kaerwyn was using) broke in a very frustrating way. It would still work from the user side, but for some reason the admin site was freezing up and I couldn't do anything with it. A reinstall didn't fix it. We decided to give up on Wordpress.
That's when I found Grawlix, which seemed absolutely perfect. It even had mass FTP upload, which means I can set up each comic issue at a time, and not per page. This saved me so much time.
The problem? Only allows one comic per installation. They have been promising for months now that the next version will allow multiple comics per installation. So we've set up Kaerwyn on it, and we're still waiting for the update so that we can add BT. Until then, no BT.
So then I got to thinking today, that I have this free time. I could try to move BT to SmackJeeves, which I've got a mirror of Kaerwyn's comic up there and I like what they do. They even have special Patreon sections (I haven't had a chance to really look into that, but the option is there). Which would be nice for you guys. You could see Patreon only content without having to dig for crap here on Patreon. (Such as the BT pages that have been uploaded here but aren't available publicly yet).
But this is why I'm asking you guys, because I told you I would work on BT pages, but I might be able to work on a BT site instead. I'm not going to have time to upload the comics anywhere else, anytime soon unless I do it during this free-time window I have now or my 2 weeks in December.
So please let me know what you think about this.
*I did that once on black friday. Got a good deal on a TV. But oh shit the crazy.
Comments
Homedragon
I think I would like to see a BT site going. The only BT pages I've read so far have been either in your DA gallery or here on Patreon. No idea it was 700 pages long, would love to read the whole thing.
Naat
Work on getting your site going! :D
Stickman
I remember a simple PHP script I wrote a while ago that takes a folder of images, and as long as their names are in order, displays them in a comic-like format (next/previous buttons). Could be a placeholder for the BT archive until you come up with something better. Let me know.
Simone Spinozzi
#2 get the site working. Try the katbox or spiderforest. I prefer to still get the pages in my email, though.
Ivory Sai'ee
This is my opinion as well. Your original BT site was what brought me in in the first place. ^,^
Jakkal
Yeah, Patreon is not good for organized stuff. But you should be able to see all the non-public BT pages here: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/Jakkal/posts?tag=BlackTapestries">https://www.patreon.com/Jakkal/posts?tag=BlackTapestries</a>
Thed Preston
Although I, personally, would like to see more BT pages, in the long run it is probably better for you to get the site working. Having a working, easy-to-navigate site, will bring in more readers and possibly more patrons.
Kayila
Personally, I'd like to see a site back up... I've not been able to go back, find where I was, and read from there on Patreon yet. Their interface is less than ideal for comics. :/
