Paul Gadzikowski

As readers of this journal may know, at the moment triangle fanfiction cartoons are on their annual summer hiatus. But when they come back, new The Hero of Three Faces cartoons - as they've been umbrella-titled since I started hosting them at WebcomicsNation - will no longer be hosted at WebcomicsNation. As convenient as the WCN process is, I've been rather spoiled by my original fanfiction website and by the Arthur, King of Time and Space website: being in whole control of the presentation, not relying on anyone else for site maintenance, etc., even if I'm not good enough at webpage programming not to have to create an HTML file for every pageview. Over the past few months Joey Manley, the WCN boss, has been having issues with WCN's hosting service, culminating in the last week or two with technical troubles that have left some WCN comics unaccessible at times. For as long as since the beginning of the year I'd been toying with the idea of moving triangle fanfiction over to hosting on the AKOTAS server, and this was just the impetus to show me that it's what I really want.

I've copied all existing The Hero of Three Faces cartoons over to http://arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/3faces/ and modified all the links on my own sites' pages I can think of. Including replacing the link on the AKOTAS main page for the WCN mirror site which I now have no intention of completing, not that I was ever any good at keeping up with it. If the present troubles ever resolve themselves I may still, as I have in the past, use that mirror site as a backup for daily AKOTAS posting in case of connection troubles with the main site. But, unless I get bumped by Manley for inactivity, I'll leave my WCN site as is. Anyway, now there's a link to my LJ at AKOTAS in place of the mirror site link. Edit And now all image source links in weekly compendium posts here at my LJ are directed to the AKOTAS server instead of the WCN server.

I posted about the thing I don't like about Webcomics Nation hosting, but that's a pretty minor thing in the big picture, and it's really unfair of me to have done that without mentioning the big plus about WCN:

I believe one of the reasons I didn't update as often in the final weeks or months (or even years) of the first fanfiction site was that it was so much work. I always took a lot of pride in hand-coding my websites myself, with nice simple, easy-to-load pre-1997 HTML (perforce because that's pretty much all the web code I know, yet). But that's a lot of work! Every upload, I had to create or revise the new cartoon's permanent page, the previous cartoon's page, the index page, the archive page; in addition to having done all the same things over at AKOTAS once already that day. And, if it was a "Daily" as well as a "sketch", I also had to create or revise the cartoon's new permanent Dailies archive page, the pages of each of the cartoons chronologically either side of it, and the Dailies' archive page! Consciously I really believed I wasn't thinking of fanfiction jokes as often as I used to, but toward the end I was noticing myself thinking, "Aw, do I really want to fire up the text editor just so I can update a fanfiction gag?"

But, with WCN, once I've drawn the gag I merely need to log in, go to the add page to installment block form, fill in two or three fields and bam! there's Greg House tugging on Superman's cape for all the world to see.

Part of the reason I elected to go with WCN-Free for the triangle fanfiction's new home was a sense of loyalty owed Joey Manley: he also runs Talk About Comics where the AKOTAS message board is hosted for free. Perhaps it's a strange manifestation of loyalty to repay a fellow for free use of his bandwidth by making more free use of his bandwidth. But I can always upgrade to a paid WCN account when qtrhorserider passes the bar and our budget has more room.

If in sf fandom twice makes it a tradition, it's now a tradition that, instead of making new year resolutions, I heed the superstition which claims that what you do on New Year's Day will be what you'll do all year. Ideally that would have included posting the new Infinity Labs movie which I had planned to make this week, but that plan was derailed by the stomach bug that appears to have been the grandsons' Christmas present to us (though, to be fair to the boys, people who stayed in Nebraska Christmas weekend seem to be catching it too). So first I drew the regularly scheduled AKOTAS update. Then we went and spent the early evening with a couple of qtrhorserider's law school buddies and their families. Then - my quota at the ISP webserver where the triangle fanfiction site is hosted having pretty much filled up over the last ten years, as previously discussed in this space - I created The Hero of Three Faces at my brand new Webcomics Nation Free account* (and I know what you're thinking, but WCN already has Serenity Tales on it so pooh).

* I mean to create an AKOTAS mirror site there too, but I've decided to wait till Manley's implemented software that won't make me update all 957-and-counting cartoons individually.

Edit: As described at the time here, I later decided to host The Hero of Three Faces on the Arthur, King of Time and Space server. At this writing the project is in progress to appropriately revise all links in this journal, but as of this writing the WCN version is still there so all links ought still to work. I shall probably remember to update here when the project is complete. Edit edit: Link revision complete.