It seems that with social media taking over, the art of making personal websites is becoming lost. have you ever considered writing up a guide on how to make one? I don't know much coding and there are so many different webhosts and most of them seem so business-oriented, that figuring out how to start up a personal website feels overwhelming. Also do you have any tips for staying motivated to churn out content for someone with extreme executive dysfunction and chronic fatigue?
yeah it used to be THE THING to have your own “webpage” or “website” and I feel like one of the last people still maintaining one. Most people these days just work in wikis or blogging platforms like tumblr and wordpress, which is quick and easy because you just write your new thoughts and click “post” and everything else is all done.Bogleech.com doesn’t run on anything like that. Every single page of it was written in notepad “by hand” using old fashioned CSS/HTML, and every single link was typed in or edited manually.This means that, to update my webcomic, I have to repeat the following steps:
Copy and paste the .html file of the current page.
Rename the copy to the appropriate new page number.
Open this new file and change all images and text content to the new update.
Change the “back” link to redirect to the correct previous page.
Open the previous page and change its “next” link to the new one.
Open the “index.html” file to redirect to the new one.
Write the new one into the “archive” page file.
Upload the four latest files (new page, previous page, index, archive) to my server along with relevant new artwork.
Hope I didn’t get any of these backwards or typo anything that breaks the structure.
Finally get told I did by a user comment and rush to fix it.
There’s people by now who probably think doing it this way is silly but I’m so used to it I kind find it comfortable, honestly, and there are fewer (though not zero) ways the whole site could be destroyed by some unexpected software update or host-wide security hole, as happened fairly frequently to platforms like wordpress.
My whole site actually began as a geocities.com homepage back in like 2001, which was folded into Yahoo Web Hosting and has now changed hands or been rebranded in some way over half a dozen times.
The dashboard I log into and its admin features have basically never changed in those whole eighteen years, except that currently, all of its LINGO reflects the idea that it’s for hosting “online stores,” like, it refers to my website as my “shop” and even added some tools for “tracking sales” and stuff, because the idea anyone would still be doing this for just a webcomic or a fandom site is apparently obsolete.
So, you would probably wanna find a more stable, more modern webhost, but there aren’t all that many out there besides, I think, “hostgator.” Maybe you can still make one through yahoo webhosting like I do, or whatever they’re calling it this week. If it’s plugged along for over two decades it’s probably gonna keep going for a while!
As for motivation....I’m pretty bad at that too. It used to be much worse. There were entire years I didn’t draw or write more than a handful of times, but feedback and comments from other people really helps. The more you update, the more feedback you get to read and the more feedback you get to read the more you feel like you’re accomplishing something “real” when you get back to work.
I guess it’s a little like grinding in a video game, then.
