Keenspot has long offered a free hosting service for webcomics, but one that has sometimes been too true to the phrase, "you get what you pay for." Now Keen is getting into the paid hosting business, promising to offer packages with the full set of "autokeen" scripts used to support the comics on KeenSpot itself.
Hosting plans range from $10 to $50 a month and the terms and conditions (space, transfer limits, extras) seem roughly comparable to other options in the market, although it's hard to put a price on the autokeen script (which may still be the "crown jewel" of comic archiving systems).
Speaking as someone who masochistically struggles to replicate and surpass the functionality of AutoKeen with my own scripts, I second your analysis of it as the “crown jewel of comic archiving systems.” My hat is off to Gav and his marvelous creation. If I didn’t already have a hosting service I’m totally content with, I’d be on KeenPrime in a heartbeat.
Question is, what is it about Autokeen that others have failed to duplicate yet? Of all the packages that I’ve come across, they all lack one major feature – AUTO ARCHIVING.
Not just the drop down menu below the strip but an honest page that has those neat little calendars all in a row.
There are other packages? 🙂
Actually yeah there’s some stuff out there besides autokeen and keenlite. There’s ATP and a port of it to Postpn, which are okay. There’s Comic Alpha (or something) which is a Postpn module used by ragingapathy.com for a comic there.
Well actually that’s all I’ve found for free. It might be possible to tweak the blog software Movable Type to do something but I haven’t had time to play with it.
Oh yeah – there’s Monkey Angst and ZWOL too – they seem to have swabbed together php-driven archives 🙂
Since Chris’s comment, I’m working on the auto-archiving thing too. 🙂 I’m not sure exactly what “auto-archiving” entails, so I’m fixating on the “page with all the little calendars in a row” part.
I still can’t get autokeen lite to work on my site. I’m getting a good amount of space at a decent price at my server now, and I don’t have to worry about it being down like it was on keenspace.My keenspace spot it pretty much dead as well. Haven’t been able to see it in a long while. Can’t find anything on getting autokeen lite installed beyond the downloads page and a few mentions on the forums. I’ve just been using blogger and an ancient page maker (AOL press, which nobody uses anymore) to update my site, but autokeen lite sounds so much nicer. Any webwranglers think they can help?
Did you ftp it up with ASCII mode on? Make sure you did. You also have to chome the script to the right permissions. Finally I think it only works well with unix servers, not windows.
You might also be confused as to what to load in your browser – you put the script URL in the brower bar – not the template pages. Whenever I used autokeen I included a forward in my index.html page to the script URL so that readers could type in a simple URL instread of http://www.wrerwe.com/cgi-bin/autokeen.cgi (or whatever.)