Sunday Papers: A Nanoc skeleton for Webcomics

Hosting Webcomics should be easy and fast. You shouldn't need Wordpress, another CMS, or a complicated script to publish your comics.

I'm making Sunday Papers in the hopes that it'll help webcomic artists quickly set up their own websites.

This is a very early version. I'm hoping to polish it more in the future. If you have any questions, please feel free to submit an issue or reach out some other way, and I'll try to help!

You see a demo of the skeleton in action here: https://sunday-papers.netlify.com

How it works

Sunday Papers uses nanoc which is a static site generator that uses the Ruby programming language

The benefits with using a static site generator are:

• There's no need to fiddle with a CMS on a server.
• You can still use templates to quickly update your site.
• The site is built as a series of files on your computer, so it’s easy to test on your own computer & not break your site.
• Changing servers is as easy as uploading files elsewhere

You put all your site's files in the content/ folder, and then run a special command to build the site. Once the site is built, you can check it on your computer, and then upload it to your server!

How to use

Getting your own copy

You can click the "Clone or download" button, then click "Download ZIP" to download the files.

(If you're like me and you use git a lot, you can make a fork of this repository)

Installation

You'll need to install Ruby and Bundler first:

• Installing Ruby
• Installing Bundler

Once they're both installed, you can install Nanoc and a simple webserver by running this command in a terminal:

bundle install

How the site is structured

These are the main files & folders to worry about when building your site:

• content/: This is where all the content for your site goes.
• content/comic: This is where you build the HTML pages for each comic
• content/pages: This is where I put the image files that make up the comic pages
• content/archive.html: This is a basic archive page
• content/stylesheet.css: This is the CSS file you can use to style your site
• content/atom.xml: This is where you define the Atom Feed for your site
• layouts/default.html: This is where you define the template used for your site
• output/: This is where your exported site will be. Once your site is exported, you can copy and paste everything in this folder to your hosting!

How to build your site

Creating a new page

1. Copy one of the example pages that are in content/comic (or copy your latest page)
2. Export your pages to the content/pages/ folder
3. Update the title and created_at (make sure to keep the kind: article line, it's used by Nanoc for some magic ✨)
4. Write the HTML for this page in the content_for(:comic) section
5. If you want to write a newspost, write the HTML for it in the content_for(:newspost) section

Changing the template

The HTML for the template is in: layouts/default.html, and the stylesheet is in content/stylesheet.css

Don't forget to update the Atom feed for your site at content/atom.xml!

Compiling and viewing the site

Nanoc has a good tutorial section that goes over building and viewing your site