I have few rules in web development and design, but the most important one is just MAKE IT SIMPLE. iStrip installation and customization I found far more difficult compared to ComicPress customization. It doesn’t help that the iStrip admin is fugly as hell and hasn’t been updated in years. The system works, but damn is it complicated and clunky. It’s basically a wordpress system without half of the automation. It also uses the Smarty system, which seems to just be PHP with a different set of codes that you have to learn all over again. I don’t mind tag systems (I started out on ComicGenesis), but this…this whole system pissed me off. I felt like I was riding a bike with a stick in the spokes, and damn, I’ve use a LOT of CMSs over the years. But it is quite possible this is all just my personal, non-reproducible, experience. I can be thick when switching gears, I’ll admit. I will most definitely not recommend iStrip or use it again though.

What iStrip offers:

Instant archiving with properly named files (if you can find the damn script). It’s hidden and barely mentioned, but it exists.

Online news posting interface

Queue ability (but not able to upload multiple files to go live the same day. You have to date them different, and can’t retroactively add files without using the instant archiving script…which erases your news posts…)

Dropdown functionality

Template systems, much like WordPress

Typical navigation ability (first, previous, next, last, as well as a random button)

And more. It’s all listed on the site.

What it Requires:

You’ll need  PHP/Apache capability, and patience. Lots and LOTS of patience.

You do NOT need a mySQL database, so this may be a system for people without the ability to make or maintain one.

Bottom Line:

I do not recommend it. There are systems much easier to use, with upkeep and support (the main site for iStrip’s creator is non-functional, so I take it to mean there is NO support) , and with better, more up-to-date features. I give it a 5/10. It works, but it’s just not worth the hassle for what you get.

You can download it here if you want it though, and best of luck!

PROS

CD’s interface reminded me a lot Drunk Duck at first, but quickly proved itself to be far more adaptable to both the advanced and beginner webdesigner. For the beginner, CD offers simple file uploads (browse and click), and point&click application additions to webpages. For the advanced user, CD gives you a file manager, importing abilities, and 2 types of HTML editors.

CD also has commenting, blog, archive page, news, calendar, gallery, RSS and storyline dropdown and stats abilities–and NONE actually require more than a simple click (and occasionally, clicking an informative link to “how-to” wiki if you are confused).  Your site is completely customizable, no ads are required (but your own can be placed at your discretion), and just…damn. It’s kinda like a 4-star hotel with room service.

I set up my Not Alone side-comic over there to test out the features, and it took me approximately 10 minutes to get situated once I found out where everything was.  I imported my comic pages from my own FTP, and they were posted in order via a choice of date formats in which my files were already named.  This is EXTREMELY useful, if say, I wanted to bring my 300-page War of Winds’ archive over there. I wouldn’t have to rename my files from YYMMDD to YYYYMMDD or something, because there are multiple formats to choose from. The archives were generated in order automatically from there.

I admit I have not tried to use all features, since I don’t normally use storyline dropdowns, but it appears that links, archives and cast features can all be edited ONLINE, and if the correct tags are already embedded in your webpage, new additions will appear automatically. Everything is nice and automatic and shiny.  Wow.

The CD community is full of informative, comic-minded people happy to welcome new members. That’s always a good sign! Nothing like saying hi in a forum where no one says hi back, right?

And oh yeah, if you have your own URL, not a problem. Looks like there’s a place to edit that as well.

CONS:

I’m a little hard pressed to find some, but here are the ones I decided on.

CD is new. You won’t have the benefit of a strong, tested, community like at larger comic hosts. This is something somewhat good (no drama, more personal help), but it means you won’t have the cross-advertising possibilities found in other places. This is a con that I sincerely hope I can cross out in time, but for now, CD needs to grow!  I would suggest more collaboration on cross-advertising between members, but I don’t even think that would work since there is no “brand” required. Man, you don’t even need a link to Comic Dish on your site! It’s difficult to cultivate a community interested in group growth when no branding is required, but I may be thinking about this too much like collective, and not enough like a webcomic host.

CD is so very free and awesome, I find myself wondering how long is it going to last? CG and DD pay for your hosting by requiring an ad, but CD requires nothing. I can’t even find a “donate for upkeep” link. Who is paying for this, and how? Even Xephyr.net has a donate link. I don’t want to say “too good to be true” because I don’t know the people in charge, but that is what paranoid me is thinking.

SUGGESTIONS:

Just for CD, I’m going to do this. I don’t know if they are taking suggestions, but what the hey, right?

The WYSIWYG editor is not named for what it does. It is only a code view, not visual.  “Advanced” and “simple,” fine, but I was so excited when I saw WYSIWYG and then so disappointed when it wasn’t that.  Kez was crushed :(

A preview function would be invaluable for template editing.  I have yet to see ANY host with this ability, however.  I GUESS tabbed browsing would work, but all the changes still go live.

Using the “simple” editor, it would be best if the page scroll did not reset to the TOP every time something was added through the simple editor.  Extremely annoying, not to mention disorienting.  Can this be fixed?

Have text links back to your admin account page and other  important edit links at all times (pages, templates, files). I was getting very angry trying to navigate between things. I did not want to be shunted back to the previous page every time I clicked “submit,” only to go back and edit things again. At the same time, when I needed a link back to the admin overview of my comic, I had to go through the dropdown menu. It was time consuming, even if I think your dropdown menu was a great way to save space. All the links don’t need to be there, but even a: “Comic Overview > Manage Files > Upload Files” format would be preferable.

Some clarification of where uploaded images/files go would be nice. Drunkduck is the only place I’ve seen that puts graphics in a “gfx” folder, not an “images” folder. For use in the tags where images are inserted, how about a reminder of the format in which image urls need to be posted if they are uploaded to CD already?  I had to fumble around for that. Did you want the WHOLE url? Would gfx/image.ext work? Did you need /gfx/image.ext like CG needs?  A little confusing. I feel stupid mentioning it, but I know if it happened to me, it’s happened to others!

All in all, Comic Dish gets a 9/10 for ease of use and features. It’s a good place to be, and now the top of my recommended list.

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Thanks all from me today! Up tomorrow is “Webdesign for the Beginner.”

Also, people linking here, I bought http://wingedwolfstudio.com today, if you’d like to link there. Slightly easier to remember.  I’ve noticed a lot of incoming links lately. I’m quite flattered, thank you, and thanks for reading!

Here is my short review: DD is a great place for people who really need and desire a lot of comments on their work. For attention-starved artists or writers, there is no better place to be.  As was stated in the TWCL forums by Metruis, you can have a very small audience on DD and still get way more comments than, say, a comic with a much larger audience on ComicGenesis. Why? Because the place is literally BUILT for people to comment.  However, and this is a big “however” for me, DrunkDuck will vex the hell out of someone who wants more control over the website. Remember, one of my biggest gripes with webcomics is when people approach their project as ONLY a comic, forgetting it’s a WEBcomic. How a comic is displayed and the functionality of the site are incredibly important. DD makes it far harder than it needs to be for a web-savvy person to take advantage of their coding knowledge!

PROS:

Commenting: As I discussed previously, there is an ability (and built-in encouragement) for people to comment.  This is the biggest pro I can think of for DrunkDuck…for reasons that follow in the Cons section. Anyways, DD has a 1-5 rating system, and only people signed in can comment. The rating system and signing in ability is something unique to DD, and it allows comic creators to moderate comments on their page.

Noob-worthy CMS: If you know absolutely nothing about HTML, CSS, PHP or CMS (indeed, if you don’t even know what these acronyms stand for), DrunkDuck is the place for you. First, CMS stands for Content Management System. You have content, and you need to manage it in the most automatic way possible.  DrunkDuck is set up so you never even have to look at code. You just…click things! Easy as pie! They even have automatic templates and extra cool little features on their “Dashboard,” like stats and visitors.  You can also add co-creators, edit news, comic pages, site templates, all online—and therefore from any computer.

Community: DrunkDuck is one of the tightest webcomic communities out there. If you bother to even show up in the forums and post occasionally, you WILL make friends. Making friends, online, is a form of networking to increase your audience size.  Everybody wants a bigger audience, so this is a good thing! The forums are highly active, and new members join all the time.  The only time I’ve seen it hard to become “one of the gang” is when it’s obvious you’re not interested in being a member there, only to try send more readers to another site. Then, you will be a pariah, so beware!

Upload Multiple Pages at Once: If you have a very big back-log of pages, and you want to upload them in batches, or just have them up all at once, DrunkDuck allows you to do this.  This really isn’t too large a pro unless you DO have a large archive, for example, if you want to create a mirror site.  DD was the last host I’m aware of to implement being able to upload more than once page at once.

Can modify the majority of elements on a webpage: DD allows you to modify your webpage code, for users who wish to. Since the automated portions of DD’s CMS are “tags,” you can move around a single snippet of code to get desired results. Even if you don’t know how to code, you could do this with a little patience.

Featured webcomics as a means of cross-advertising: DD has “featured webcomics” on its front page.  Comics are chosen out of the thousands there to be linked on the front page for about 5-7 days. This is free, often random, and a huge boost to your audience numbers.  However, your comic must actually be somewhat GOOD to be featured, so it doesn’t happen to everyone.

Can favorite and track  updates too: Unlike other webcomic hosts, DD allows you to favorite and track updates of comics. This is a feature that is part community, part networking, and in my opinion, something that ought to be implemented in other hosting sites.

CONS:

And this is where I start to scream. DrunkDuck is ABSURDLY ad-heavy. There’s an ad at the top of the page, beneath the comic, and at the bottom of the page. THREE ADS. Per page. One ad is acceptable, 3 is overkill, by a long shot.  You have no control over these ads either, and they all are automatic.  They will appear whether they are hard-coded or not.

DD is often slow, sometimes unreachable: Because of many factors, DD is a pain in the rear to use, both as a reader and as a comic creator.  The ads slow the page loading. The entire SYSTEM of DD (posting pages, logging in and commenting) relies on a mySQL database, and I swear, half the time I try to use the site, I get mySQL error warnings. For a site this large, with this much traffic, it is uancceptable. NO OTHER HOST HAS AS MUCH DOWNTIME AS DRUNKDUCK. So far. >.<

A history of going off-line: DrunkDuck has “gone down” at least once (and I believe TWICE, but it was before my time), like a flaming tub of lard. EVERYONE there lost all their material, without explanation.  There was no data retrieval, or even an effort to let anyone know what happened. This is an unacceptable business practice.

Owned by Platinum Studios: More than a year ago, perhaps 2 now, DD was bought out by Platinum Studios. In case you haven’t heard, Platinum is basically bankrupt. This buyout coincides with when DD became a horrible place for a webcomic to be hosted: when the ads appeared, when things got slow, when half the featured comics were published by Platinum Studios…etc.  Basically, due to the bad track record of Platinum (the DJ Coffman incident, WOWIO, etc), I encourage people not to rely on DD always being there.

Very difficult to customize a webpage: I’m getting tired of writing it, and you’re probably getting tired of reading it: A webcomic is half comic, and half WEB. DrunkDuck makes it very difficult to customize a webpage.  Because you don’t have FTP access, and not even an intelligent file manager, you are forced to jump through hoops to customize anything.  You must edit your home page through a online interface only, one that does not even have a preview function. All files, such as images or other webpages, must be loaded ONE AT A TIME. There is no bulk uploading. Files that you upload also have the habit of mysteriously vanishing, without warning, and refuse to remain in your account.  This, of all the cons, makes me the angriest!

Being hosted at DD will STIFLE your growth. You need to learn to use the entire web (which is more than just DD, people) to advertise your comic, and help it grow.  DD teaches you to rely on a system that is inherently set up to condone web-ignorance. Your comic will never reach its full potential on DD, I really don’t care how many comments you get.  If you can’t be self-sufficient, if you need the random comments of young kids “5-ing” you with each update, you really have no idea what it’s going to be like outside the nest.  The BEST webcomics take advantage of what the web, and coding, and CMS has to offer.

DrunkDuck is full of young, inexperienced comic creators, or conversely, print-comic creators uninterested in making webcomics (they just want to advertise their print comics, and have no real interest in becoming part of the webcomic community). This isn’t a bad thing for them so much as it is for a person seriously invested in their comics.  I am very happy that those young, inexperience comic creators have a free and easy place to BECOME experienced, and that those print-comic creators have the ability to increase their web advertising.  But, as a person always trying to improve my own comics, to increase their audience, these two groupss only hold me back. I don’t need to be “5-ing” or people who look down on webcomics, I need colleagues at MY level. Serious writers and artists will find DD a hindrance.

Finally, DD does not give you a subdomain. A subdomain would be “comic.drunkduck.com.” Instead, you get “drunkduck.com/comic.” What does this mean? Well, you lose a LOT of SEO opportunities.  You can’t use perma-links, for one.  You can’t be an advertiser of ads by places other than Project Wonderful for two (they require at the very least, a subdomain.) You can’t increase your pagerank as much as you would if you had your own domain. As far as I’m aware, you can’t even mirror your DD account at your own URL, you have to forward it instead. For example, I could not make it so that warofwinds.com showed my DD page. Instead, I would have to FORWARD warofwinds.com to drunkduck.com/warofwinds.  This is a huge limitation to your growth!

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With my lambasting complete, DrunkDuck scores a 5/10.  Because you CAN customize your page (regardless of the difficulty of it), and you DO have a CMS (even if it’s…intelligence-challenged), and there IS a strong community, DD has a lot of things going for it. But due to bad managment, a bad history, and all-around FRUSTRATION, I can’t speak very highly of DD as a reliable host where you could stay for quite some time and GROW.

The next review will be of Comic Dish or Webcomics Nation, but before that (since I will be trying out each host before I write a review of it), a few other, shorter, articles.  Thank you everyone who posted your opinions about the ComicGenesis review.

First I’m going to say this: of all the free comic hosts I’ve used, CG is the best for advanced webcomic creators. An advanced webcomic creator is one who realizes that WEB is half of the word “webcomic,” and endeavors to create a site that matches the quality of the comic. CG is the WORST site out there for people who have no interest in creating a webcomic, and only want to display their  comic online.  That is a thin line, but it IS there.

PROS:

Comic Genesis as a host offers many things, the most important of which in my opinion is FTP access. For those of you who do not know what an FTP (“File Transfer Protocol”)is, it’s how people instantly add things to and update a site WITHOUT going through an admin “browse-click” area of the site.  On CG I could upload an entire site in seconds, whereas at DrunkDuck I would have to load each file singly through a “browse-click” method.   I personally use FireFTP (a FireFox add-on) to connect to my FTP.  Anyone who has used an FTP for more than 2 weeks will never go back to any other method.

ComicGenesis also offers you an automatic archiving and news  system called AutoKeen. For webcomics, a content managment system is a must-have! You should NEVER EVER EVER be building each archive page by hand. It’s not 1992 anymore!  Autokeen is very simple for those new to CSS/HTML coding to use, since all you have to do is move around “tags” in the code. There’s no need to worry about big, bulky code chunks like with ComicPress.  Autokeen has a lot of extras built into it too, for most archiving needs like dropdowns, calendars, etc. Yes, you also can schedule updates for the future.

CG gives you near-total control over site design. Since you are able to edit everything about a webpage, your website is what you want it to be, with the exception of the mandatory, above-the-fold leaderboard size ad you MUST display. The reason hosting is free at CG is because you pay for it by displaying ads. For people not well-versed in creating webpages, CG has dedicated an entire wiki and guide to helping you learn, as well as free templates you can install in the meantime.

CG is a moderately active community as well, and everyone who has been making webcomics for more than a couple months understands the importance of having a good community. CG is full of highly experienced comic creators (both print and web) who will help you out, give you advice, and talk with you. The forums all have active moderators, and someone is always taking care of any server/database malfunctions.  The place is well taken care of!

My final pro for CG is their cross-advertising systems.  The first one is called the “newsbox.”  Comics are rotated in based on how often they update, and most people who participate also display the newsbox on their own site. This is free, and really good, advertising.  The second system is the CG front page “pog” area. If you submit a pog, it will be put up, and that’s more free advertising.

CONS:

ComicGenesis absolutely sucks for the total webcomic noob. “What’s an FTP?”  “What is HTML?” “How do I center things on a webpage?” If these are questions you constantly ask (and have no desire to get the answers to these questions ), CG is NOT the place for you. The learning curve is quite steep if you have no idea how to use HTML, and is VERTICAL if you don’t care to learn.  CG is the least “automatic” of all the free comic hosts out there.

The queue! Any member of CG knows and hates the queue! If you are updating your site or your comic, you must WAIT YOUR TURN.   The queue is a necessary evil because of how AutoKeen works, and it can be is incredibly annoying.  Sometimes the wait can be more than half an hour, because if you are trying to manually update your comic near midnight EST, when everyone else has already set their comic to update automatically, you get to wait for THOUSANDS of sites to update before you.  So, you’re screwed if you’re in a hurry, because there is nothing you can do.

No inherent commenting system. CG is the only free webcomic host I know of that does NOT have commenting ability. This is a small con, however, because of free commenting systems like haloscan / js-kit.

No control over what ads are displayed on your site. I’m unsure whether or not to include this one, since NO free webcomic hosts allows this control.  You will get ads depending on the rating of your site, and these fluctuate between “Be a Mormon” to “J-list” to “YOU ARE THE 1,000,000th VISITOR, WE’RE NOT KIDDING CLICK ME.”

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All in all, CG gets an 8/10 score from me. Of all the free hosts I’ve used, they’re the best for the advanced user, hands down.  Some things could be done better, done faster, or updated,  and I’m confident they will be in time.