myartpage, a personal web page system for artists

This is a content management system primarily for artists looking to build and host a personal website for their art.

Caution

This project is currently under development and not yet usable.

Why am I building this?

I make comics myself¹, but publishing art on platforms is restrictive in many ways. Popular comics platforms, like Tapas, are built for the vertical scrolling (webtoon) format, but I draw mine for the double paged (book) format and would like for my readers to experience them as such.

At the same time, I yearn in general for having a home on the web that's truly my own². The modern web is owned by corporations, and one's space there feels rented. Personal web / indie web / small web is a concept I really like and want to be part of.

Obviously, existing tools for building websites already exist, but they don't quite cut it for me. So, why not make something that'll be fun to build and might benefit others once it's done?

What features are planned?

• Admin panel for managing features and content
• Customizable pages and themes
• Comic reader supporting double paged formats
  • Support for other formats as well; webtoon, classic webcomic, and more.
• Art gallery page with extensive tagging/categorization system
• Blog posts
• Comments

In addition, this system is meant to be useable by artists, not developers. Therefore, an auxiliary goal of this project is to write an accessible, non-technical guide to getting a website up and running with it, starting from scratch:

• How to get a hosting server
  • Recommendations for hosting services
  • Step-by-step server setup guides for each recommendation
• Installing myartpage on the server
• Using myartpage
  • First time setup
  • Customization
  • Content management
  • How to update the app when there are new releases

Footnotes

1. See e.g. Treehouse on Tapas ↩

2. why - IndieWeb ↩