#wordpress website back up

[neversetyoufree]

Heyo, I want you guys' feedback for something important!

Tumblr eating my post earlier got me thinking, and given the sheer amount of writing I've done on this blog, it would probably be a good idea to start backing up my meta somewhere that won't randomly make some posts (or even whole blogs) disappear out of nowhere. So:

I'm hypothetically down for any of these (or any combination thereof).

A few notes:

For those unfamiliar with Pillowfort, it does require either an invitation link or a $5 payment to join. I'm happy to send invite links, but this might be a limiter

If I start reposting (more) on Pillowfort, it'll probably be on my main grassbreads account. I already have a handful of VnC posts on there, including some that are reposts from this blog.

Please only vote for making my own website if you think you (or anyone else) would actually, like, visit it. It's a cool idea in theory, but I don't think it's worth the effort of making it if I'm the only one that ever goes there 😔.

[voidimp]

trying to find any information on anything is so fucking impossible these days

[ktempestbradford]

I have been on a Willy Wonkified journey today and I need y'all to come with me

It started so innocently. Scrolling Google News I come across this article on Ars Technica:

At first glance I thought what happened was parents saw AI-generated images of an event their kids were at and became concerned, then realized it was fake. The reality? Oh so much better.

On Saturday, event organizers shut down a Glasgow-based "Willy's Chocolate Experience" after customers complained that the unofficial Wonka-inspired event, which took place in a sparsely decorated venue, did not match the lush AI-generated images listed on its official website.... According to Sky News, police were called to the event, and "advice was given."

Thing is, the people who paid to go were obviously not expecting exactly this:

But I can see how they'd be a bit pissed upon arriving to this:

It gets worse.

"Tempest, how could it possibly--"

source of this video that also includes this charming description:

Made up a villain called The Unknown — 'an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls'

There is already a meme.

Oh yes, the Wish.com Oompa Loompa:

Who has already done an interview!

As bad (and hilarious) as this all is, I got curious about the company that put on this event. Did they somehow overreach? Did the actors they hired back out at the last minute? (Or after they saw the script...) Oddly enough, it doesn't seem so!

Given what I found when poking around I'm legit surprised there was an event at all. Cuz this outfit seems to be 100% a scam.

The website for this specific event is here and it has many AI generated images on it, as stated. I don't think anyone who bought tickets looked very closely at these images, otherwise they might have been concerned about how much Catgacating their children would be exposed to.

Yes, Catgacating. You know, CATgacating!

I personally don't think anyone should serve exarserdray flavored lollipops in public spaces given how many people are allergic to it. And the sweet teats might not have been age appropriate.

Though the Twilight Tunnel looks pretty cool:

I'm not sure that Dim Tight Twdrding is safe. I've also been warned that Vivue Sounds are in that weird frequency range that makes you poop your pants upon hearing them.

Yes, Virginia, these folks used an AI image generator for everything on the website and used Chat GPT for some of the text! From the FAQ:

Q: I cannot go on the available days. Will you have more dates in the future? A: Should there be capacity when you arrive, then you will be able to enter without any problems. In the event that this is not the case, we may ask you to wait a bit.

Fear not, for this question is asked again a few lines down and the answer makes more sense.

Curious about the events company behind this disaster, I took myself over to the homepage of House of Illuminati and I was not disappointed.

I would 100% trust these people to plan my wedding.

This abomination of a website is a badly edited WordPress blog filled with AI art and just enough blog posts to make the casual viewer think that it's a legit business for about 0.0004 seconds.

Their attention to detail is stunning, from how they left up the default first post every WP blog gets to how they didn't bother changing the name on several images, thus revealing where they came from. Like this one:

With the lovely and compact filename "DALL·E-2024-01-30-09.50.54-Imagine-a-scene-where-fantasy-and-reality-merge-seamlessly.-In-the-foreground-a-grand-interactive-gala-is-taking-place-filled-with-elegant-guests-i.png"

"Concept.png" came from the same AI generator that gets text almost, but not quiiiiiite right:

There are a suspicious number of .webp images in the uploads, which makes me think they either stole them from other sites where AI "art" was uploaded or they didn't want to pay for the hi-res versions of some and just grabbed the preview image.

The real fun came when I noticed this filename: Before-and-After-Eventologists-Transformation-Edgbaston-Cricket-Ground-1024x1024-1.jpg and decided to do a Google image search. Friends, you will be shocked to hear that the image in question, found on this post touting how they can transform a boring warehouse into a fun event space, was stolen from this actual event planner.

Even better, this weirdly grainy image?

From a post that claims to be about the preparations for a "Willy Wonka" experience (we'll get to this in a minute), is not only NOT an actual image of anyone preparing anything for Illuminati's event, it is stolen from a YouTube thumbnail that's been chopped to remove the name of the company that actually made this. Here's the video.

If you actually read the blog posts they're all copypasta or some AI generated crap. To the point where this seems like not a real business at all. There's very specific business information at the bottom, but nothing else seems real.

As I said, I'm kinda surprised they put on an event at all. This has, "And then they ran off with all our money!" written all over it. I'm perplexed.

And also wondering when the copyright lawyers are gonna start calling, because...

This post explicitly says they're putting together a "Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Experience" complete with golden tickets.

Somewhere along the line someone must have wised up, because the actual event was called "Willys Chocolate Experience" (note the lack of apostrophe) and the script they handed to the actors about 10 minutes before they were supposed to "perform" was about a "Willy McDuff" and his chocolate factory.

As I was going through this madness with friends in a chat, one pointed out that it took very little prompting to get the free Chat GPT to spit out an event description and such very similar to all this while avoiding copyrighted phrases. But he couldn't figure out where the McDuff came from since it wasn't the type of thing GPT would usually spit out...

Until he altered the prompt to include it would be happening in Glasgow, Scotland.

You cannot make this stuff up.

But truly, honestly, I do not even understand why they didn't take the money and run. Clearly this was all set up to be a scam. A lazy, AI generated scam.

Everything from the website to the event images to the copy to the "script" to the names of things was either stolen or AI generated (aka stolen). Hell, I'd be looking for some poor Japanese visitor wandering the streets of Glasgow, confused, after being jacked for his mascot costume.

HE LIVES IN THE WALLS, Y'ALL.

[techcofinds12]

The Ultimate Guide to Taking Wordpress Website Backup

Taking regular backups of your WordPress website is crucial to ensure the safety and security of your content. This ultimate guide will walk you through the steps to take a backup of your WordPress website, including both manual and automated methods.

Method 1: Using a WordPress Backup Plugin (Recommended)

Using a WordPress backup plugin is the most convenient and reliable way to create and manage backups. Some popular backup plugins include UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, and Duplicator.

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[screentones-webcomicresources]

There are many web hosting companies to choose from if you're taking the plunge into making your own website with a comic content management system (CMS) like ComicControl or Grawlix, a Wordpress comic theme like Toocheke or ComicPress, or a HTML template to cut/paste code like Rarebit. While these solutions are generally free, finding a home for them is... generally not. It can be hard to choose what's best for your webcomic AND your budget!

We took a look at a few of the top hosting services used by webcomics creators using webcomic CMSes, and we put out a poll to ask your feedback about your hosts!

This post may be updated as time goes on as new services enter the hosting arena, or other important updates come to light.

Questions:

💻 I can get a free account with Wix/Squarespace/Carrd, could I just use those for my comic? - Web hosts like this may have gallery functions that could be adapted to display a series of pages, but they are very basic and not intended for webcomics.

📚 Wait, I host on Webtoon, Tapas, Comic Fury, or some other comic website, why are they not here? - Those are comic platforms! We'll get into those in a future post!

🕵️‍♀️Why does it say "shared hosting"? Who am I sharing with? - "Shared hosting" refers to sharing the server space with other customers. They will not have access to your files or anything, so it is perfectly fine to use for most comic CMSes. You may experience slowing if there is too much activity on a server, so if you're planning to host large files or more than 10 comics, you may want to upgrade to a more robust plan in the future.

Web Host List

Neocities

Basic plan pricing: Free or $5/month. Free plan has more restrictions (1 GB space, no custom domain, and slower bandwidth, among other things)

Notes: Neocities does not have database support for paid or free accounts, and most comic CMS solutions require this (ComicCtrl, Grawlix, Wordpress). You will need to work with HTML/CSS files directly to make a website and post each page.

Hostinger

Basic plan pricing: $11.99/month or $7.99/month with four year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 4 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain for the 1st year. Free SSL Certifications. Weekly backups.

KnownHost

Basic plan pricing: $8.95/month or $7.99/month with four year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 4 year plans available).

Notes: Free DDOS protection. Free SSL Certifications.

InMotion Hosting

Basic plan pricing: $12.99/month or $9.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, and 3 year plans available).

Notes:  Free SSL Certifications, free domain names for 1 and 3 year plans. 24/7 live customer service and 90-day money-back guarantee. Inmotion also advertises eco-friendly policies: We are the first-ever Green Data Center in Los Angeles. We cut cooling costs by nearly 70 percent and reduce our carbon output by more than 2,000 tons per year.

Reviews:

👍“I can't remember it ever going down.”

👍“InMotion has a pretty extensive library full of various guides on setting up and managing websites, servers, domains, etc. Customer service is also fairly quick on responding to inquiries.” 👎“I wish it was a bit faster with loading pages.”

Ionos Hosting

Basic plan pricing: $8/month or $6/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 2 and 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain for the first year, free SSL Certification, Daily backup and recovery is included. Site Scan and Repair is free for the first 30 days and then is $6/month.

Reviews:

👍“Very fast and simple” 👎“Customer service is mediocre and I can't upload large files”

Bluehost

Basic plan pricing: $15.99/month or $4.95/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain and SSL certificates (for first year only). 24/7 Customer Service. Built to handle higher traffic websites. Although they specialize in Wordpress websites and provide updates automatically, that's almost a bad thing for webcomic plugins because they will often break your site. Their cloud hosting services are currently in early access with not much additional information available.

Reviews:

👎"The fees keep going up. Like I could drop $100 to cover a whole year, but now I'm paying nearly $100 for just three months. It's really upsetting."

👎"I have previously used Bluehost’s Wordpress hosting service and have had negative experiences with the service, so please consider with a grain of salt. I can confirm at least that their 24/7 customer service was great, although needed FAR too often."

Dreamhost

Basic plan pricing: $7.99/month or $5.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free SSL Certificates, 24/7 support with all plans, 97-day moneyback guarantee. Not recommended for ComicCtrl CMS

Reviews:

👍“They've automatically patched 2 security holes I created/allowed by mistake.” 👍“Prices are very reasonable” 👎 “back end kind of annoying to use” 👎 “wordpress has some issues” 👎 “it's not as customizable as some might want“

GoDaddy

Basic plan pricing: $11.99/month or $9.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free 24/7 Customer service with all plans, Free SSL Certificates for 1 year, free domain and site migration.

Reviews:

👍Reasonable intro prices for their Economy hosting, which has 25GB of storage 👍Migrated email hosting service from cPanel to Microsoft Office, which has greater support but may not be useful for most webcomic creators. 👎 Many site issues and then being upsold during customer service attempts. 👎 Server quality found lacking in reviews 👎 Marketing scandals in the past with a reputation for making ads in poor taste. Have been attempting to clean up that image in recent years. 👎 “GoDaddy is the McDonald's of web hosting. Maybe the Wal-Mart of hosting would be better. If your website was an object you would need a shelf to put it on. You go to Wal-Mart and buy a shelf. It's not great. It's not fancy. It can only hold that one thing. And if we're being honest - if the shelf broke and your website died it wouldn't be the end of the world.The issue comes when you don't realize GoDaddy is the Wal-Mart of hosting. You go and try to do things you could do with a quality shelf. Like, move it. Or add more things to it.” MyWorkAccountThisIs on Reddit*

Things to consider for any host:

💸 Introductory/promotional pricing - Many hosting companies offer free or inexpensive deals to get you in the door, and then raise the cost for these features after the first year or when you renew. The prices in this post are the base prices that you can expect to pay after the promotional prices end, but may get outdated, so you are encouraged to do your own research as well.

💻 Wordpress hosting - Many of the companies below will have a separate offering for Wordpress-optimized hosting that will keep you updated with the latest Wordpress releases. This is usually not necessary for webcomic creators, and can be the source of many site-breaking headaches when comic plugins have not caught up to the latest Wordpress releases.

Any basic hosting plan on this list will be fine with Wordpress, but expect to stop or revert Wordpress versions if you go with this as your CMS.

🤝 You don't have to go it alone - While free hosts may be more limited, paid hosting on a web server will generally allow you to create different subdomains, or attach additional purchased domains to any folders you make. If you have other comic-making friends you know and trust, you can share your server space and split the cost!

Want to share your experience?

Feel free to contribute your hosting pros, cons, and quirks on our survey! We will be updating our list periodically with your feedback!

[copperbadge]

Howdy! I am considering submitting manuscripts I've written to a publisher or possibly self publishing. The publisher states on their website that authors must maintain an active social media presence. I'm not normally a social media type, Tumblr is my only one. What would you reccommend for such? Is it worth it to pay someone to make a website for me? Thanks and many virtual kisses for Dot and Deebs!

Honestly, I haven't submitted to a publisher since before a lot of modern social media existed. :D

It is my understanding, but this is secondhand information, that publishers want you to have either a twitter or a tiktok, preferably both, where you're frequently active and have a high follower count, because they want you to be able to publicize your book on it. One of many reasons I don't even consider trad publishing anymore is that I don't want to spend a significant chunk of my time filming videos for the sole purpose of hawking my books.

Now, as I said, that's an inference I've drawn; you may want to speak to someone who has been trad published recently to get the inside scoop (readers if you work in publishing or have been published recently, feel free to add commentary; remember to comment or reblogs, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks). I do have an author website but I built my own; I don't know what the going rate is for paying someone to build one these days but most website platforms are pretty intuitive to use -- I built mine on Wordpress and I'm building a new one on Wix currently, and at this point both are very drag-and-drop oriented. I do think a website is a good thing for an author to have, but I wouldn't pay someone to build one for you until you've taken a swing at DIY and decided it's not where you want to spend your time and energy.

In terms of self-publishing, the good news is that none of the rules apply; this is also the bad news. :D Because the thing about selfpub is that you either pay or DIY for...everything. It can be very inexpensive; when I publish a book the only direct monetary cost is what I pay for an ISBN and a proof copy of the book, which I will make back in the first 10 sales or so. However, I am "paying" in man hours in terms of typesetting, cover design, uploading the PDFs to lulu.com, proofing the initial copy, correcting the proof and reuploading (which usually involves further typesetting), and of course all the publicity -- website design and redesign, copywriting, tumblr posting. And while my profit per copy sold is well above what most authors with traditional publishers will make, that's because the publisher is doing a lot of the work for you. And, because I don't have an active twitter or tiktok or a publisher, my books are not very widely publicized. Undoubtedly I sell fewer copies than I would if I had a robust twitter following, but catch me touching that rancid wasteland without inch-thick gloves on.

So -- I think it's probably pretty important to understand that I have deliberately rejected trad publishing for good but not lucrative reasons, and I'm considered at best an iconoclast and more commonly a crank for having done so. If you can go the tradpub route, I would, but I also wouldn't put any money you're not prepared to write off as a loss into that pursuit. Definitely I would see if there's anyone in the industry you can reach out to who can answer these questions with a more thorough understanding of what publishers look for in an author and how to go about achieving that than I possess.

In any case, good luck! It's a journey regardless and I hope you enjoy your time on the path wherever you end up. And I'll give the cryptids a special cuddle for ya.

[spotofmummery]

Once More - On Creating a Personal Website

Over the weekend, I wrote the above post on my main blog about a new FREE webhost called Nekoweb. While I still use Neocities myself, I just wanted to toss this out here as an alternative, especially given where sites like this and WordPress are going in terms of the lack of your content's safety and your control of your work.

Learning basic HTML is pretty straightforward, and there's lots of templates out there to get you started. Once you get the hang of it, you might surprise yourself with how much fun you have designing your own site and not being held back by anyone else's design and content choices!

The cool thing is, you can make your own website, then link your stuff here (like I did above) to share it to any social media you like. But it's not TIED specifically to Tumblr or X or Bluesky because you host it somewhere else. So, you can still post it to social media to get the word out about your writing or art, while maintaining control of where it lives in the long run.

HTML files can be backed up. So if something happens to your host, as long as you keep your website files on your computer or other media, you can always turn around and upload it to a new host. No fear of having your stuff wiped forever because it's locked in a social media account database you can never reach.

Just some considerations!

[reimenaashelyee]

I think I've never detailed your website until now, it is incredibly organized! As an artist who knows only the basics of programming and creating webpages, but is very interested in having one, may I ask, what site hosting do you use? or which one do you recommend? i don't really know anything about that. I would love to see the resurgence of the personal website/ blog.

Thank you!! My website and the infrastructure I've built surrounding it is my pride and joy! More and more lately I've come to appreciate the security it's given during these trying internet times.

I use Wordpress and a drag-and-drop builder called Live Composer (I wouldn't recommend it over its competitor, only because Live Composer has very bad documentation). My hosting is SiteGround. All those tools are stuff I adopted 10 years ago, since I started The World in Deeper Inspection. This way of using Wordpress - being accessible but labyrinthe and too-much - suits me, probably because my personality is like this too.

But a lot of people want something simpler. I'd recommend pursuing resources from MelonLand, The Cheapskate's Guide and Sadgrl to get started. They are more for static site generation, of the neocities type. And in their simplicity, they offer you more control compared to my set-up. They are also part of a movement called the Indie Web or Retro Web, which I consider myself a part of mentally and spiritually, if not fully. These are folks who are bringing back blogs, webrings, web surfing, and all the ways that made the internet fun and fresh back then.

If my website seems super organised, it's less about the tools used and more due to the thinking I have developed for it - coming up with an approach of how I want to be presented online, imagining my ideal site experience and implementing it, as well as solving the problem of having both a Professional Site + a Casual Personal Online Home under the same URL. Here's a blog post I made recently about A Personal Website VS A Portfolio, and an older post, Site Revamp + Artist Sites Should Be More Fun Maybe?, that describes my website/internet philosophies. From those two, the main point to take away is that establishing the landing page as a signpost that allows the visitor to choose their destination solved basically my problem of profesional/personal separation.

TLDR I have a lot of thoughts about making artist websites and returning to the independent web!! This has been a 3 years journey for me!!!

[kradeelav]

status update ~

thought i'd write a summary of what I've been up to, and what's next art-wise! honestly, I'm finding that I work well mentally consolidating projects to quarters of the year; it gives me hard deadlines while allowing nuttiness to blow up two weeks (or more) of my life at a time and still not be stressed.

year recap first!

(Q1) collaborated with @/lululeighsworld to give gunter the fabulous possessed gacha entrance he deserves!! leigh's writing here to this day feels uncannily and perfectly in-character, no small feat with the mind games this devious possessed old man likes to play ~

(Q1) also finished the 140k your ruin, my ruin gunter/corrin revelation fic! the reception from y'all has been absolutely exceptional and while I don't think I'll ever write another fanfic of that length (lol) being able to point to it re: my fire emblem fates: revelation feelings is so ... satisfying. the ossan smut holds up pretty damn well too.

(Q1) NaZine (I) anthology printed and completely sold out, but the digital version is eternally available on the shop if you're still interested. I'll admit that anthologies are not normally my thing for being too prim and milquetoast, but this is anything but. if you've been dying for more sleazy uniform fetish, we got it there!

(Q2) Comics-wise, both Dead is Calling and YRMR:[Epilouge] were finished and ready to be collected in my planned gunter/corrin doujinshi called ashes and ghost; there's one more (eye-blistering smut) strip planned there with a few internal pages.

(Q3) Website-wise, IRON CROWN moved to rarebit from wordpress, and the main landing page was revamped entirely to better pave a road for preparations to self-host the website.

that's not even counting the smaller flash artwork like the fe: alphabet challenge, and hellsing exchange work also done in between everything else.

what's next?

(Q4) you might have seen me show wip's from a FE:Heroes (gacha) comic; while it's tonally softer than my usual work, It's 14-ish pages of some very, very guilty pleasure topics. raw feelings but in a different way? idk, you'll see.

(Q4) I have a personal deadline to get the website updates done by November, namely moving my art/update logs off of wordpress, and also likewise either moving to a different host or self-hosting the entire site (on a rasbpi lol) and removing the middle-man entirely.

(Q4/2025) finishing ashes and ghost (the gunter/corrin doujinshi)! I've been taking a needed break from it (something learned back in the webcomics days) but I can't wait to get back in some hentai level smut that's frankly, going to push me in so many ways. :D;;

(2025) NaZine II will likely be printed in the upcoming year with the same team heading it up. There's delicious stories already planned including multiple shotas and Daddies, oh my - needless to say, it's the kind of sleaze and sauce i dig.

that's all for now!

[beatingdrumspouringwine]

Hi there! I've recently taken more of an interest in Hellenism, but I don't at all know where to start. I've never really been religious before, only really knowing the basics of Christianity. I did see you created a post of advice for beginner Hellenists, but I was wondering, if it's not too much trouble, if you had any additional information for someone like me who's just starting out.

Hello anon! Sorry for how long it took to write this up, I definitely went a little bit wild on this one :)

First off, welcome to Hellenic Polytheism! It's definitely a wild ride, but depending on what sect of Christianity you come from, it's not completely and totally foreign.

Starting off with a list of some websites, general resources, and accounts that I have found helpful:

theoi.com

Apostolos Athanassakis translations of the Orphic and Homeric Hymns

Hellenic Polytheism: Household Worship by Labrys

Hellenion.org

@khaire-traveler's Subtle Worship Master List

@thegrapeandthefig's Wordpress

And now breaking them all down, because I love when people justify their choices to me :)

theoi.com The nice thing about this website is that it's about as much information about the Gods as you can possibly want in one place. Not only does it seemingly have just about every possible deity in the Greek pantheon, but it has an incredibly good collection of historical references, family trees, and even artwork from ancient Greece.

Apostolos Athanassakis translations While theoi.com is good, I'm not the biggest fan of the version of the translations that they use for the Orphic and Homeric Hymns - they're a bit too "translated" for me. This meaning that the translations in question don't sit too close to the original text, and in my opinion, if you're trying to understand a deity through some ancient work, you want to get the closest translation to the original, even if that means sacrificing some of the flowery language. And Athanassakis' translations are some of my favorite for those "close translation" hymns. You can find his work on the Internet Archives.

Hellenic Polytheism: Household Worship I think this is one of those staples that every Hellenic Polytheist should take a look at at least once. It's pretty dry, but within it, there are plenty of rituals and general information on Hellenism as a religion. I don't use most of the rituals in it, but even still, I keep a copy on hand for the future when I'm able to practice more freely.

Hellenion.org This is a pretty good resource for more modern Hellenic Polytheist prayers, as well as rituals. This is a more heavy reconstructionist lean (which focuses on an accurate recreation of Hellenic Polytheism, as opposed to revivalism, which focuses on recreating it for the modern day), but still incredibly helpful, and a bit easier to understand than Hellenic Polytheism: Household Worship.

@khaire-traveler's subtle worship masterlist Honestly, if a resource like this existed when I was first starting out, I would be light years ahead of where I am now. Stag has managed to fit just about every idea you'd need to get started with worship/offerings into an easy-to-digest format, and I find myself going back to it time and time again when I start incorporating a new deity into my practice.

@thegrapeandthefig's Wordpress I don't even think I could summarize how amazing Aurora is into one little paragraph. There's everything on her Wordpress from historical offerings, to modern festivals, to dissections of various ancient customs. One of the things which has helped me the most from her blog has been her Attic calendar, which shows the schedule of the various religious observations throughout the year (and there are a lot).

Finally, a few extra words of advice that I might not have included in my original post that you mentioned in the ask:

Try to have one prayer memorized for each deity, if you're easily able to memorize things. Chances are, after about a year or so, you'll probably have a prayer or two that you really like and will have memorized because you've said it enough (I definitely have my fair share). And there's definitely something nice about finding yourself in a situation that reminds you of your deity and being able to just rattle off a prayer.

Try to avoid TikTok for your spiritual knowledge. But, if you want to add a bit of Hellenic flair to your FYP, I'd recommend Bria Melitta and hesiodic (who's also on here and maybe on TikTok as well [I might be wrong, haven't been on TikTok in a hot minute] under the name @olympianbutch). Both of these creators are really good, and I especially love Dagan for his devotion to Zeus, who often gets a bad rap from new practitioners because of behavior attributed to Him in myths.

Other than the resources I mentioned, some good stuff for casual reading would be: the Iliad and the Odyssey, any ancient Greek plays (I'd recommend starting with Aristophanes, if the tragedies are a bit too heavy), and Hesiod's Theogony.

And that's about all I can possibly think of throwing at you right now! I hope this came in handy, and as always, if you have more questions, please feel free to drop more in my ask box :) I'm always more than happy to answer questions and help to the best of my ability!

[mysimsloveaffair]

While Dub is in Oasis Springs with Dwight, Maia starts chatting with the interior designer about the new house. They review some of Maia and Dub’s favorite colors and discuss a theme that involves bringing the outside in with nature-inspired colors and an array of house plants. The more they chat, the more excited Maia gets. The designer gathers everything they discuss and promises to send some 3d renderings and design plans by the end of the day.

Maia picks Tambara up from her playmat on the floor.

Maia: *to Tambara* You’ll have your own bedroom soon, my little Tadpole.

Tami snuggles against her mother, which makes Maia’s face light up with love for her daughter. Maia sits on the couch, holding Tami in her arms with buds of joy blooming within her thoughts.

Maia’s Thoughts: Is this what happiness feels like? I know I deserve this, and won’t let my mind fool me into thinking I don’t. I deserve to have my daughter in my arms and Dub by my side. I know this feeling won’t last forever, but it’s here now, and I will relish it. I’m happy, content, and in love, and I deserve to be!!

(Full post available to read on my website)

(Note: My WordPress website has been having database connection errors lately. If you visit the website and can’t access it because of an error, try again later and it should be back up. Thanks for your patience while I work on getting this issue resolved.)

[natalieironside]

hello ms. comrade Ironside, longtime reader, first time caller.

as a fellow writer of queer erotica, I was wondering if you had any thoughts/spoons to share those thoughts on wordpress being swept into the AI debacle under automattic? (I think that’s what you use to host your cool website, forgive me if I am mistaken.) I’m trying to figure out where to set up an author website of my own so I don’t have to host my stuff on tumblr anymore, but I’m a bit gun-shy in the current moment. I know AI trawling is inevitable in today’s internet, but as someone who’s been doing the indie author thing for some time (and admirably!), is there something you would recommend, best practices or otherwise, to someone just trying to get their metaphorical kite off the ground? or anything you wish you knew when you set up your own author-type socials? any thought at all would be genuinely appreciated.

thanks for your time, and I hope you and yours are as well as can be expected 🖤

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but afaik nothing approaching best practices has been figured out yet; it's all already happening and there's precious little as can be done to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Of course I uncheck all the little boxes in settings and deny them my consent or whatever, but I don't think a gaggle of unimaginative piss-bellied technocrats who decided it was a sensible use of vast amounts of water and power to teach a computer how to write very badly are what I'd call trustworthy. I'm still gonna move all my website shit off of Wordpress because they won't let me get rid of the stupid AI assistant thing, but that's more a case of their UI being ugly and dumb than me thinking it'll actually do any good.

Best I can tell you on that front is to try to find yourself a niche and develop yourself as an artist from there; "Write the kinds of books you wish other people were writing" is good general advice, and a human operator is always going to be capable of things a predictive network just isn't. Other ppl are gonna disagree with that, but they're wrong. Their understanding of resource allocation and scarcity is just childishly naive and you shouldn't waste your time listening to people who think we're gonna solve climate change with apps or whatever.

Far as social media goes, this is still the best one for hocking books as far as I can tell. I'm hearing a lot of good things about Cohost and Pillowfort, but their user bases are still quite small, and I haven't found the indie author community on Bluesky yet. If Tumblr goes belly up I'll probably end up migrating to one of those first two primarily b/c I think longform blogging is the secret stuff for ppl like me who are just too crabby and agoraphobic to be Twitter influencers; I may not be any good at videos or regular quick posts or documenting the writing process (which is too bad, b/c a lot of my friends who do that stuff seem to be having fun with it), but I sure can Lay Out Some Thoughts in A Few Paragraphs and I like to think that's something ppl expect from a novelist.

Also, never get in a public argument, don't go posting Your Thoughts On The Issues unless someone asked or you feel like you've got something interesting to say, and be very selective with how much and what personal information you give out to the hoi polloi. Those are my 3 rules for how to do social media good.

[screwtheprinceimtakingthehorse]

I'm going to build a new website for all my writing (still evaluating my options; open to suggestions!), and it'll be a slow moving process because my WordPress archive is huge, going back 15 years and spanning three different domains for different projects.

Also, I want to keep following all my fave folks from this place, and, well, it's been 13 years on here, too. So I'll keep my account (if just to retain the username) and observe. In the meantime, you can find me in all the usual other places via this dinky dink, or join the discord. Any supplemental fanfic material is gonna end up on dreamwidth from now on (I'll do my best to link those posts in the notes on AO3, too).

[librarycard]

So basically i had this digital humanities assistant job that i got hired for as a freshman in college (first of all unprecedented) and i ran an academic conference and built a bunch of websites and handled so much research and did all of the things i loved and got PAID to do it but i was the only other employee besides my boss and she quit to go work at another more prestigious university with a better job and i was so sad but i was excited for her and TWO YEARS LATER they’ve hired a new librarian to her position and they opened up two different positions for students one being an assistant for wordpress and research and websites and workshops and consultations etc and i applied OBVIOUSLY but i was scared so i sent an email and basically she immediately got back to me and was like I REMEMBER YOU I HELPED RUN THE CONFERENCE WITH YOU can we schedule an interview immediately and i went to the interview and she told me she immediately messaged my former boss when i sent that email and my boss was like HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY and she DID and was like thank god you applied because now i donte even have to go through the applications at all and sorry to all of those other applicants because their application will literally never be seen but i don’t CARE Inknow i wanted this more than them anyway to be honest i don’t think it would be possible for anyone to want this more than me and she’s giving me twice the amount of hours and i’m getting paid 6 more dollars an hour than the university standard for student positions and i have a fucking CUBICLE in the library i’m a real employee. My awesome life

[dduane]

I just want you to know, whenever I see your icon on my dashboard I get a very fond warm feeling, like I've just discovered my favorite aunt is coming to visit.

That is all. Hope you are doing well.

Thank you!

And yeah, we're both good.... now seguéeing [sp?...] back into the non-holiday world, in which work is piled up and deadlines loom. But that's not exactly unexpected. :)

...Meanwhile, have just discovered that one of our food websites has been infected by spam links... and am now (while beginning its disinfection) considering junking its old theme—which has admittedly been getting on my nerves of late—and building a new version of the site on the same theme that’s going to be used to update EuropeanCuisines.com next month. (That one, our oldest “hobby” food website, has needed an update for a long while: it’s the last one still running on the Drupal platform. We’ll be moving it to Wordpress.)

(sigh) And I get to deal with all this excitement while finishing a book, starting two more, and finally getting to grips with the animation side of Daz 3D so I can start doing some decent book trailers. And then I get to go in next week for that spinal MRI. ...Yay. (eyeroll)