Using Blogger to Syndicate Your Comics on the Web for Free
I'm using blogger to post my comics on the web (soapythechicken.com)... it works great, for my purposes. It makes content management extremely simple, and makes it easy to offer subscription via rss feeds.
It is totally unnecessary to have any knowledge of web page building or anything to use this system... the blogger system is extremely easy to set up, and they will host all of your content for you if you want them to (or you can host it yourself, as I do, but that takes a wee bit of work & knowledge).
It is well worth picking up a bit of basic html tagging knowledge for posting to your blog... there are only a couple that are absolutely necessary to know though... the "a href" tag for linking, and the "img" tag for adding images to your posts. Here's a good "cheat sheet" for html. Really, this stuff is easier than pooping... don't be intimidated by it. You just put one tag at the beginning of the area you want to affect and one at the end with a / to close it. And you can look at almost any page on the web for examples of how to do this by going to the view> source option in your browser. EASIER THAN POOPING!
Blogger will set you up with a basic template for your site to begin with, but you'll most likely want to alter it. Again, a little knowledge of html goes a long ways to making your site more useful. For example, you will probably appreciate it greatly if you make the width of your content wider so you can do larger comics without breaking your page. The Soapy site is built off of the main default Blogger template, minima, with alterations to make the page wider, add a header, and to have some useful menus down the side. View the source and you can probably figure out how I did anything if you want to copy it for your own purposes. You may want to copy and save the template in a blank text file before you make any changes to it in case you accidentally make a change you don't like.
My experience with the feeds produced by blogger hasn't been so good. I tried hitting the feeds with myYahoo, and it didn't work. However, I found a good solution... I set up another free account on feedburner.com to produce an alternate feed, and that one seems to work everywhere so far. It makes it so folks can go to the page and click on a button for their preferred news reader, as well, which is nice. See the Soapy the Chicken Feed here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoapyTheChicken
Here's the blogger feed to compare it to, if you're interested:
http://soapythechicken.com/feed/atom.xml
The blogger/feedburner combo is definitely the slickest free solution for cartoonists to syndicate themselves on the web that I've seen.
It is totally unnecessary to have any knowledge of web page building or anything to use this system... the blogger system is extremely easy to set up, and they will host all of your content for you if you want them to (or you can host it yourself, as I do, but that takes a wee bit of work & knowledge).
It is well worth picking up a bit of basic html tagging knowledge for posting to your blog... there are only a couple that are absolutely necessary to know though... the "a href" tag for linking, and the "img" tag for adding images to your posts. Here's a good "cheat sheet" for html. Really, this stuff is easier than pooping... don't be intimidated by it. You just put one tag at the beginning of the area you want to affect and one at the end with a / to close it. And you can look at almost any page on the web for examples of how to do this by going to the view> source option in your browser. EASIER THAN POOPING!
Blogger will set you up with a basic template for your site to begin with, but you'll most likely want to alter it. Again, a little knowledge of html goes a long ways to making your site more useful. For example, you will probably appreciate it greatly if you make the width of your content wider so you can do larger comics without breaking your page. The Soapy site is built off of the main default Blogger template, minima, with alterations to make the page wider, add a header, and to have some useful menus down the side. View the source and you can probably figure out how I did anything if you want to copy it for your own purposes. You may want to copy and save the template in a blank text file before you make any changes to it in case you accidentally make a change you don't like.
My experience with the feeds produced by blogger hasn't been so good. I tried hitting the feeds with myYahoo, and it didn't work. However, I found a good solution... I set up another free account on feedburner.com to produce an alternate feed, and that one seems to work everywhere so far. It makes it so folks can go to the page and click on a button for their preferred news reader, as well, which is nice. See the Soapy the Chicken Feed here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SoapyTheChicken
Here's the blogger feed to compare it to, if you're interested:
http://soapythechicken.com/feed/atom.xml
The blogger/feedburner combo is definitely the slickest free solution for cartoonists to syndicate themselves on the web that I've seen.
Labels: Cartooning Lessons, Lessons, Useful Information
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