Understanding AutoKeen

To new Keenspacers, Keenspace seems vastly different from all the hosts you've ever encountered. Even experienced webmasters can be a little intimidated by the system. However, it's actually quite simple when you get down to it. Anyway, here's the breakdown:

Keenspace has a service called AutoKeen, which will do most of the work for you as long as you provide it with the correct information. It will write the code to put up your comic on the date you want it, generate archive pages for you, and update your links without you having to do much.

There are two levels (folders) in a Keenspace account; The workspace and the public_html. The workspace is where all the 'rough' work is stored (comics, templates, images etc). public_html is the where all the finished work (work processed and put together by AutoKeen) is kept and is also what readers will see when they come to your website.

What AutoKeen does is read the rough work from the workspace folder, and magically transforms it into a nice webpage for viewing. All this is automated, which means you can upload a month's worth of comics at a time and leave the site to run by itself. Also, AutoKeen is time-sensitive, which means you can set what time you want a comic to go up and AutoKeen will do so at the right date.

AutoKeen uses something called KeenTags, which are contained in rows of triple asterisks. KeenTags are simply placeholders, and to those of you who are web-savvy, they're just like XML tags with set functions.