(crossposted from the art tumblr)

the tl;dr

IRON CROWN as a free comic is now off of wordpress and can be viewed by a neat, robust HTML/CSS/JS comic template called rarebit! effectively nothing has changed for the reader, beyond expecting a little more reliability of uptime over the years.

all comic pages and previously paywalled patreon posts can also be downloaded in this art dump for free, as mentioned in the new author's notes.

the long story:

When talking shop about site/platform moves under this handle, I think it's useful to realize that us (taboo) kink artists live in an actively adversarial internet now, compared to five years ago.

meaning that we have to live with an expectation that 99% of platforms (including registrars and hosting, let alone sns sites) will ban/kick us without warning. this might explain the overly cautious/defensive way we discuss technologies - weighing how likely (and easily) the tool can be used against us vs the perks.

for example: has a harassment mob bullied the platform owners into quietly dropping lolisho artists? trans artists? does the platform/technology have a clear, no-bullshit policy on drawn kink art (specifically third rail kinks like noncon)? does the platform have a long history of hosting r18 doujin artists/hentai publishers with no issue? does the company operate in a nation unfriendly to specific kinks (eg fashkink artists fundamentally incompatible with companies based in germany, when other kinks might be OK?). i talk with a few different groups of artists daily about the above.

but that gets tiring after a while! frankly, the only path that's becoming optimal long-term is (a) putting kink art on your personal site, and if possible, (b) self hosting the whole thing entirely, while (c) complementing your site with physical merch since it's much harder to destroy in one go.

with that said - I've been slowly re-designing all of my pages/sub-domains as compact 'bug out bags'. lean, efficiently packed with the essentials, and very easy to save and re-upload to a new host/registrar near instantly (and eventually, be friendly to self-hosting bandwidth costs since that's now a distant goal).

how does this look in theory, you ask?

zero dependencies. the whole IRON CROWN comic subdomain is three JS files, a few HTML files, one CSS file, and images. that's it.
no updates that can be trojan horse'd. I'm not even talking about malware though that's included; I'm talking about wordpress (owned by the same owners as tumblr cough) slipping in AI opt-outs in a plug-in that's turned on by default. I used to think wordpress was safe from these shenanigans because wordpress-as-a-CMS could be separate from wordpress-as-a-domain; I was wrong. they'll get you through updates.
robust reliability through the KISS principle. keep it simple stupid. malware/DDOS'ing has an infinitively harder time affecting something that doesn't have a login page/interactive forms. You can't be affected by an open source platform suddenly folding, because your "starter" template is contained files saved on your desktop (and hopefully multiple backups...). etc.

so how does this look in practice?

To be fair, you're often trading convenient new shiny UI/tools for a clunkier back-end experience. but i think it's a mistake to think your art site has to look like a MIT professor's page from 1999. with IRON CROWN, I've effectively replicated it from a (quite good) comic template in wordpress to 98% of the same layout in pure HTML/CSS/JS via rarebit. Should rarebit's website go "poof", I've got the initial zip download of the template to re-use for other sites.

I frankly have a hard time recommending rarebit for an actively updating webcomic since you personally might be trading too many advantages like SEO tools, RSS feeds, etc away - but for a finished webcomic that you want to put in "cold storage" - it's amazing. and exactly what I needed here.

krad

(no subject)

the tl;dr

the long story:

how does this look in theory, you ask?

so how does this look in practice?

(no subject)

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