Phalanx's Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Keenspace Site Online

Whew! Talk about a long title! (You should have seen the earlier one)

So hey-ho, you got a comic and you want to put it online for the world to see. You've applied for a Keenspace Account, submitted your sample comic and weeks later... wow! you've got your username and password, and your account is ready and waiting for you. Congratulations! You've accomplished a lot more than most people have. Anyway, here are the list of basic basic steps you have to do to get your comic online:

STEP 1: Find Plans (Apologies for the DOTT reference.)
Get the comics you want to put up, and get them into digital format (Scan 'em whatever). This may sound banal, but it's amazing how some people never think how they're going to transfer those lovely drawings of theirs to the computer and subsequently the Internet. Of course, I'm sure you know this and I don't have to tell you this, right?

Look here for more information on getting your images ready.

STEP 2: Name your creations
I'm assuming you already have a working name for your comic, else you wouldn't have gotten the Keenspace account. What I mean by naming your creations is naming the image files that will be the actual pages of your comic. You'll want to have them in a common image format (.gif, .jpg .tiff .png whatever you make the call).

However, to be able to use the automatic update feature that comes with Keenspace, you need to update your comics in date format. For example, if today's date is the 9th of June, 2003. And Page 1 of your comic will be posted today, then name your comic page 20030609.jpg (or whatever file format you chose). Remember it's four digits for the year, two digits for the month, and two digits for the day. So, YYYYMMDD.jpg.

Name all your files this way, but with the dates you want them up. It can be a future date if you like.

STEP 3: Get Thee a FTP Program
(Skip this if you have one and know how to use it) If you don't, see here.

STEP 4: It's Movin Time!
You'll need to know what your Host URL is first. Usually, its YOURSITENAME.keenspace.com. That means if my comic is called The Jaded, and my login name is thejaded, then the URL I should FTP to is thejaded.keenspace.com.

Got that? Great!
Start up your FTP program and enter the following information into the these fields. I'll use my name for these examples:

The other fields you can pretty much ignore. (Note: If your FTP program has an annonymous setting, uncheck/turn it off). Now try to connect. If you can't, there might be a problem with your account. You can try connecting using butch.keenspot.com. If you're getting bad password messages, try requesting a new password from the lost password facilty. (URL available on Main Page)

If you still can't, either Keen is having trouble with the server or your account isn't ready.

What's that? You can connect!? Hurrah! On to the next step!

STEP 5: Welcome to Your Account!
Your FTP program should show you that there are two folders in your account. One will be called public_html and the other will be called workspace. Ignore public_html for now, workspace is where you need to go.

STEP 6: Just in case you screw up...
Make a copy of all the files in /workspace and save them in your hardrive. They'll come in handy if you mess up later. Not that I'm saying you will, but just in case. Remember, backup = safety net.

STEP 7: View your workspace
Open the workspace folder. There should be 5 items in it: 3 folders and 2 html files. The folders are: comics, images and webpages. The html files are indextemplate.html and dailytemplate.html.

STEP 8: Upload the comics into the comics folder
Upload all your comic images (they are in date format, right?) to the comics folder. Use your FTP program to do so.

STEP 9: The Unwanted First Page
The sample comic you submitted while signing up for the account will have been put as your first comic page. If that's what you intended then you need not do anything. However, if you wish to remove it and replace it with another comic, do the next step:

STEP 10: Clearing out the Comic
Go to /public_html. The go to the /comics folder. Note that there will be one comic image in there. delete it, but DO NOT DELETE THE FOLDER.
Go to /public_html and then to the /d folder. There will be one dated HTML file in there as well. As with the comic, delete it but DO NOT DELETE THE FOLDER.

STEP 11: Log in to Keenspace SiteAdmin
Go to SiteAdmin.

Remember that username/passwords are case sensitive!

STEP 13: Request an update!
Select the option that says: 'manual update'. You'll be given three options: Regular, Index only and Full. Pick Full. Notice the number of people in the queue before you select the option.

STEP 14: Queue up!
If the last step has been done right, the number of people in the queue should increase by 1. Your comic update is now in the queue and all you have to do is wait.

STEP 16: It's the final countdown! The numbers shown on the queue are actually how many people there are in the queue, and not how many people before its your turn. Please do NOT refresh your browser to check the numbers, as in some browsers, the update information will be resent, which means you are requesting two updates and clogging the server.

You can check the progress of your site by checking the http://sitename.keenspace.com/rss.xml (Replace 'sitename' with your site name). The last line should tell you when your site last updated, down to the second.

Go to your site and check it out. A basic basic version of your site should have appeared, with a title, author name, one page of comic, and links to other pages if you uploaded more than one page! Congratulations! Your Keenspace site is now functional. Now all you have to do is pretty up the site using html and images, and maybe add some features, but I'll leave that up to you.