I want to write a webcomic.

As the title suggests, I want to write a web-comic but to be honest, it feels a lot harder than I thought.

Immediately, I took the time to look around web-comics out at the moment. Most of them run on a program called comicpress, so I looked it up and was like "Yes, I can do this and what's more, it’s free!!!" So I downloaded the program.

It was at the point of opening the downloaded zip file that I realised that it was just a load of folders. But have no fear IT'S A ZIP FILE, just need to unzip it, it’s just a load of stuff compacted for easier download.

*To every guy who has some knowledge of tech saying to themselves that I am a moron because of anything I have written about computers in this blog, humour me. I am just a mere mortal to everyone I know who has any tech knowledge*.

So I unzip it with absolute glee, "just a small predicament" I said to myself" let’s gets this program started".

It was at the point of unzipping the zip file that I had downloaded that I realised that it was just a folder.

Now I mean this as a compliment to every person who has a webcomic but you make it look so easy. Even the ones who don't use comicpress, they're really nice looking!!! The ones with comicpress are themselves really nice, they look polished. You all do cool things like make the buttons look cool and have really gorgeous looking banners and little cool looking comment boxes and it's all really cool!!!

Anyway back to my story. So I went on the internet and looked at how to use comicpress and also asked people I know on twitter to send the word out that I wanted help with how to use comicpress.

Now, with the first thing, I came across the fact that comicpress needs wordpress. I looked up wordpress and this seems to do anything you want to do... with blogging. Now I am still at this point not sure what that means, I mean there are large amount of blog websites out there. There's windows live spaces which is extremely simple, tumblr is another, then there's livejournal and blogger. They tell me it’s easy but... you know what I'm going to continue with this point later.

I think at this point what I'm curious about is with all these blogging websites, why do you want a program to do what they do? You know what I think I know the answer, I assume it had to do with having an independence, like if you went on livejournal, you may be able to do anything but it’s always going to have the phrase livejournal.com in the name or blogger has blogspot.com. Is this all to do with wanting a name like ArunHackett.com?

Now as I said earlier I did a second thing, I went on twitter, which was more interesting. I received a joking tweet asking me "what is this comicpress you speak of?" from one of the guys who made comicpress. He has tried to be helpful at several points but even now that program means nothing to me.

Well, that's not true, I have learnt things about comicpress, namely that you need a host. This was the point I started giving up. There are obviously hosting websites out there, both paying and free with the former being a much better option. I chose not to go for paying because to be honest, I'm not that good and also I wasn't doing this for prophet. I wanted to simply learn to draw. I notice with many webcomics that their art improves and becomes more refined. I wanted to do a webcomic for that reason. I could post a few up, like 10 comics, and then let people know about the website just to play it safe.

The free option for webhosting I have done in the past, many a year ago with my windows live space. I would upload music so that I could get a web link that I could play music on the media player on windows live spaces. This was always a possibility but this all links into comicpress as a whole. IT’S NOT EASY or at least it’s not easy in the way a newcomer to web knowledge would think so.

I went to a friend's workplace and asked about uploading comics. For reasons that this may be too complicated for me, she advised making a flickr account for this reason.

So now there's a flickr account sitting empty as I try to finish one webcomic. I’ve done all the drawing and inking, now I need to do the Lettering. And the banner. And my biological science degree.

*Birdman sigh*