#backing up a wordpress site

[techcofinds12]

The Ultimate Guide to Taking Wordpress Website Backup

Taking regular backups of your WordPress website is crucial to ensure the safety and security of your content. This ultimate guide will walk you through the steps to take a backup of your WordPress website, including both manual and automated methods.

Method 1: Using a WordPress Backup Plugin (Recommended)

Using a WordPress backup plugin is the most convenient and reliable way to create and manage backups. Some popular backup plugins include UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, and Duplicator.

[centeris2]

I figured out a day or two ago that SSO Ridethrough still exists. The unique domain name just expired, so it's back to using a wordpress url, which is why a bunch of the old links don't work

So if you guys want to see the Old Quest Dialogue (like 2018 and earlier), look for ssoridethrough.wordpress.com (not linking it directly because we all know tumblr can be weird about links). If a link on the site doesn't work trying the search function instead, so far it's worked for me.

[fingertipsmp3]

I’m so tempted to turn one of my url-hoarding sideblogs into a studyblr (specifically for tracking my language learning and holding myself accountable) but wow this might be the worst time to start a new tumblr blog lol

[ktempestbradford]

I have been on a Willy Wonkified journey today and I need y'all to come with me

It started so innocently. Scrolling Google News I come across this article on Ars Technica:

At first glance I thought what happened was parents saw AI-generated images of an event their kids were at and became concerned, then realized it was fake. The reality? Oh so much better.

On Saturday, event organizers shut down a Glasgow-based "Willy's Chocolate Experience" after customers complained that the unofficial Wonka-inspired event, which took place in a sparsely decorated venue, did not match the lush AI-generated images listed on its official website.... According to Sky News, police were called to the event, and "advice was given."

Thing is, the people who paid to go were obviously not expecting exactly this:

But I can see how they'd be a bit pissed upon arriving to this:

It gets worse.

"Tempest, how could it possibly--"

source of this video that also includes this charming description:

Made up a villain called The Unknown — 'an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls'

There is already a meme.

Oh yes, the Wish.com Oompa Loompa:

Who has already done an interview!

As bad (and hilarious) as this all is, I got curious about the company that put on this event. Did they somehow overreach? Did the actors they hired back out at the last minute? (Or after they saw the script...) Oddly enough, it doesn't seem so!

Given what I found when poking around I'm legit surprised there was an event at all. Cuz this outfit seems to be 100% a scam.

The website for this specific event is here and it has many AI generated images on it, as stated. I don't think anyone who bought tickets looked very closely at these images, otherwise they might have been concerned about how much Catgacating their children would be exposed to.

Yes, Catgacating. You know, CATgacating!

I personally don't think anyone should serve exarserdray flavored lollipops in public spaces given how many people are allergic to it. And the sweet teats might not have been age appropriate.

Though the Twilight Tunnel looks pretty cool:

I'm not sure that Dim Tight Twdrding is safe. I've also been warned that Vivue Sounds are in that weird frequency range that makes you poop your pants upon hearing them.

Yes, Virginia, these folks used an AI image generator for everything on the website and used Chat GPT for some of the text! From the FAQ:

Q: I cannot go on the available days. Will you have more dates in the future? A: Should there be capacity when you arrive, then you will be able to enter without any problems. In the event that this is not the case, we may ask you to wait a bit.

Fear not, for this question is asked again a few lines down and the answer makes more sense.

Curious about the events company behind this disaster, I took myself over to the homepage of House of Illuminati and I was not disappointed.

I would 100% trust these people to plan my wedding.

This abomination of a website is a badly edited WordPress blog filled with AI art and just enough blog posts to make the casual viewer think that it's a legit business for about 0.0004 seconds.

Their attention to detail is stunning, from how they left up the default first post every WP blog gets to how they didn't bother changing the name on several images, thus revealing where they came from. Like this one:

With the lovely and compact filename "DALL·E-2024-01-30-09.50.54-Imagine-a-scene-where-fantasy-and-reality-merge-seamlessly.-In-the-foreground-a-grand-interactive-gala-is-taking-place-filled-with-elegant-guests-i.png"

"Concept.png" came from the same AI generator that gets text almost, but not quiiiiiite right:

There are a suspicious number of .webp images in the uploads, which makes me think they either stole them from other sites where AI "art" was uploaded or they didn't want to pay for the hi-res versions of some and just grabbed the preview image.

The real fun came when I noticed this filename: Before-and-After-Eventologists-Transformation-Edgbaston-Cricket-Ground-1024x1024-1.jpg and decided to do a Google image search. Friends, you will be shocked to hear that the image in question, found on this post touting how they can transform a boring warehouse into a fun event space, was stolen from this actual event planner.

Even better, this weirdly grainy image?

From a post that claims to be about the preparations for a "Willy Wonka" experience (we'll get to this in a minute), is not only NOT an actual image of anyone preparing anything for Illuminati's event, it is stolen from a YouTube thumbnail that's been chopped to remove the name of the company that actually made this. Here's the video.

If you actually read the blog posts they're all copypasta or some AI generated crap. To the point where this seems like not a real business at all. There's very specific business information at the bottom, but nothing else seems real.

As I said, I'm kinda surprised they put on an event at all. This has, "And then they ran off with all our money!" written all over it. I'm perplexed.

And also wondering when the copyright lawyers are gonna start calling, because...

This post explicitly says they're putting together a "Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory Experience" complete with golden tickets.

Somewhere along the line someone must have wised up, because the actual event was called "Willys Chocolate Experience" (note the lack of apostrophe) and the script they handed to the actors about 10 minutes before they were supposed to "perform" was about a "Willy McDuff" and his chocolate factory.

As I was going through this madness with friends in a chat, one pointed out that it took very little prompting to get the free Chat GPT to spit out an event description and such very similar to all this while avoiding copyrighted phrases. But he couldn't figure out where the McDuff came from since it wasn't the type of thing GPT would usually spit out...

Until he altered the prompt to include it would be happening in Glasgow, Scotland.

You cannot make this stuff up.

But truly, honestly, I do not even understand why they didn't take the money and run. Clearly this was all set up to be a scam. A lazy, AI generated scam.

Everything from the website to the event images to the copy to the "script" to the names of things was either stolen or AI generated (aka stolen). Hell, I'd be looking for some poor Japanese visitor wandering the streets of Glasgow, confused, after being jacked for his mascot costume.

HE LIVES IN THE WALLS, Y'ALL.

[traegorn]

Time to be Internet Cockroaches

So I am constantly in active rebellion of the centralized web. We're in a world where all of our online interactions happen on just a handful of sites (and this includes DIscord and Tumblr too).

SO I WANT TO REMIND FOLKS -- YOU CAN BUILD YOUR OWN STUFF, AND WHEN YOUR FRIENDS DO IT YOU SHOULD USE IT.

Now I know not everyone can pay for their own webhosting and setup their own stuff, but for those of us who can -- we should. When every major platform is at risk, we should be splintering out across the web and decentralizing as much as we can.

I host the Nerd & Tie [dot] Social forums for my friends and my stuff for instance.

It's a "slow forum" right now, but it can support a lot more -- and works well on mobile. But, like, on a lot of webhosts setting up a Flarum forum like that takes almost zero technical skill.

And you can set up your own blog on a self hosted server. Like Wordpress is incredibly easy to set up on your own site, We run the main Nerd & Tie site -- and we use it to serve up our podcasts. I also use it to power my webcomics like Peregrine Lake.

My personal website comes from the old internet, so my blog is literally run from a hand coded piece of software I hacked together originally back in like 2001.

And you might be asking yourself "How do I follow blogs that are independently run" and the answer is simple -- RSS feeds.

RSS is an XML format that breaks down items in a standard way that can be interpreted by an RSS reader. You probably already use something that touches RSS feeds -- Podcasts run entirely on RSS feeds. I don't know if it still works, but even Tumblr blogs have RSS feeds at the url [username].tumblr.com/rss.

Now I use Thunderbird for email, which has a built in RSS reader to monitor certain blogs to watch for import updates.

Is it harder to discover people to follow in this model? Absolutely. The onus is on the reader to seek out the folks they want to read and interact with. But it's safer. We see with congress's attempts to constantly ban TikTok and Musk's destruction of Twitter that centralized platforms have deep vulnerabilities. By moving across the web to multiple datacenters on multiple hosts we ensure that we're much harder to get rid of.

Time to be the cockroach.

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[theteablogger]

PSA

I keep hearing rumors that many, if not most, Tumblr staff have been laid off and that there are startlingly few people keeping the site running these days. Losing Tumblr would be awful for many reasons, but the most immediately relevant for this post is that nearly all information regarding Andy's history would disappear, leaving him free to engage in any problematic or abusive behavior he wanted without fear of his targets' being tipped off as to his true nature by a simple Google search. I've worked hard to create a comprehensive resource for anyone looking for information about Andy and I would hate to see it vanish.

With that in mind, I've just finished backing up my Tumblr to WordPress. Yes, they're owned by the same company, but WP isn't hemorrhaging money the way Tumblr has been for years, so it's unlikely to go away. I'm still making some tweaks, but most of the work is done and I'll be cross-posting there (manually, ugh) from now on.

You can find my backup blog here. My regular username and all variations on it were taken.

[crippled-peeper]

alright anons LISTEN UP.

back in the day (like YEARS before gay marriage was legal) trans men were surviving and finding each other via youtube FTM transition videos (before it was bought by google) and we had to scour random ass sketchy blogs and forums (wordpress sites that you would think were coded by dinosaurs) to find ANY information about testosterone whatsoever. to discover that it was possible to be ourselves. to find pictures of people that made us sob because we saw ourselves for once.

the photos and info that was being shared were nothing like max on the L word or that kid on degrassi, who were some of our only representation. it was a community of ACTUAL trans men who gave us reason to fucking live because one day, we could be that. one day we could fucking be that.

together, in these little hidden pockets that only we knew about, we were the FTM community. it is an experience that i will forever hold dearly. even when i wasn’t ready to accept who i was, i could still come to the FTM corner of the web, and feel some unnameable solace.

i have trouble relating to a lot of trans people who didn’t experience that. and it’s okay if you didn’t.

but do not ever fucking dare to even so think about looking down on the term FTM. you have NO fucking clue how sacred it is. none.

love to all my FTMs and MTFs and transsexuals and homosexuals and anyone who doesn’t want to assimilate into “updated terms”. i love you all so fucking much and i am so proud of you for being trans as long as you have been.

morg, ily.

I’m so bad at answering asks but I agree with everything youve said here

I love being FTM and meeting other FTMs online thru the years

Sometimes I wish there was an FTM island so I could go live there forever :)

[screentones-webcomicresources]

There are many web hosting companies to choose from if you're taking the plunge into making your own website with a comic content management system (CMS) like ComicControl or Grawlix, a Wordpress comic theme like Toocheke or ComicPress, or a HTML template to cut/paste code like Rarebit. While these solutions are generally free, finding a home for them is... generally not. It can be hard to choose what's best for your webcomic AND your budget!

We took a look at a few of the top hosting services used by webcomics creators using webcomic CMSes, and we put out a poll to ask your feedback about your hosts!

This post may be updated as time goes on as new services enter the hosting arena, or other important updates come to light.

Questions:

💻 I can get a free account with Wix/Squarespace/Carrd, could I just use those for my comic? - Web hosts like this may have gallery functions that could be adapted to display a series of pages, but they are very basic and not intended for webcomics.

📚 Wait, I host on Webtoon, Tapas, Comic Fury, or some other comic website, why are they not here? - Those are comic platforms! We'll get into those in a future post!

🕵️‍♀️Why does it say "shared hosting"? Who am I sharing with? - "Shared hosting" refers to sharing the server space with other customers. They will not have access to your files or anything, so it is perfectly fine to use for most comic CMSes. You may experience slowing if there is too much activity on a server, so if you're planning to host large files or more than 10 comics, you may want to upgrade to a more robust plan in the future.

Web Host List

Neocities

Basic plan pricing: Free or $5/month. Free plan has more restrictions (1 GB space, no custom domain, and slower bandwidth, among other things)

Notes: Neocities does not have database support for paid or free accounts, and most comic CMS solutions require this (ComicCtrl, Grawlix, Wordpress). You will need to work with HTML/CSS files directly to make a website and post each page.

Hostinger

Basic plan pricing: $11.99/month or $7.99/month with four year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 4 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain for the 1st year. Free SSL Certifications. Weekly backups.

KnownHost

Basic plan pricing: $8.95/month or $7.99/month with four year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 4 year plans available).

Notes: Free DDOS protection. Free SSL Certifications.

InMotion Hosting

Basic plan pricing: $12.99/month or $9.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, and 3 year plans available).

Notes:  Free SSL Certifications, free domain names for 1 and 3 year plans. 24/7 live customer service and 90-day money-back guarantee. Inmotion also advertises eco-friendly policies: We are the first-ever Green Data Center in Los Angeles. We cut cooling costs by nearly 70 percent and reduce our carbon output by more than 2,000 tons per year.

Reviews:

👍“I can't remember it ever going down.”

👍“InMotion has a pretty extensive library full of various guides on setting up and managing websites, servers, domains, etc. Customer service is also fairly quick on responding to inquiries.” 👎“I wish it was a bit faster with loading pages.”

Ionos Hosting

Basic plan pricing: $8/month or $6/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 2 and 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain for the first year, free SSL Certification, Daily backup and recovery is included. Site Scan and Repair is free for the first 30 days and then is $6/month.

Reviews:

👍“Very fast and simple” 👎“Customer service is mediocre and I can't upload large files”

Bluehost

Basic plan pricing: $15.99/month or $4.95/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free domain and SSL certificates (for first year only). 24/7 Customer Service. Built to handle higher traffic websites. Although they specialize in Wordpress websites and provide updates automatically, that's almost a bad thing for webcomic plugins because they will often break your site. Their cloud hosting services are currently in early access with not much additional information available.

Reviews:

👎"The fees keep going up. Like I could drop $100 to cover a whole year, but now I'm paying nearly $100 for just three months. It's really upsetting."

👎"I have previously used Bluehost’s Wordpress hosting service and have had negative experiences with the service, so please consider with a grain of salt. I can confirm at least that their 24/7 customer service was great, although needed FAR too often."

Dreamhost

Basic plan pricing: $7.99/month or $5.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free SSL Certificates, 24/7 support with all plans, 97-day moneyback guarantee. Not recommended for ComicCtrl CMS

Reviews:

👍“They've automatically patched 2 security holes I created/allowed by mistake.” 👍“Prices are very reasonable” 👎 “back end kind of annoying to use” 👎 “wordpress has some issues” 👎 “it's not as customizable as some might want“

GoDaddy

Basic plan pricing: $11.99/month or $9.99/month with three year commitment (monthly, 1, 2, and 3 year plans available).

Notes: Free 24/7 Customer service with all plans, Free SSL Certificates for 1 year, free domain and site migration.

Reviews:

👍Reasonable intro prices for their Economy hosting, which has 25GB of storage 👍Migrated email hosting service from cPanel to Microsoft Office, which has greater support but may not be useful for most webcomic creators. 👎 Many site issues and then being upsold during customer service attempts. 👎 Server quality found lacking in reviews 👎 Marketing scandals in the past with a reputation for making ads in poor taste. Have been attempting to clean up that image in recent years. 👎 “GoDaddy is the McDonald's of web hosting. Maybe the Wal-Mart of hosting would be better. If your website was an object you would need a shelf to put it on. You go to Wal-Mart and buy a shelf. It's not great. It's not fancy. It can only hold that one thing. And if we're being honest - if the shelf broke and your website died it wouldn't be the end of the world.The issue comes when you don't realize GoDaddy is the Wal-Mart of hosting. You go and try to do things you could do with a quality shelf. Like, move it. Or add more things to it.” MyWorkAccountThisIs on Reddit*

Things to consider for any host:

💸 Introductory/promotional pricing - Many hosting companies offer free or inexpensive deals to get you in the door, and then raise the cost for these features after the first year or when you renew. The prices in this post are the base prices that you can expect to pay after the promotional prices end, but may get outdated, so you are encouraged to do your own research as well.

💻 Wordpress hosting - Many of the companies below will have a separate offering for Wordpress-optimized hosting that will keep you updated with the latest Wordpress releases. This is usually not necessary for webcomic creators, and can be the source of many site-breaking headaches when comic plugins have not caught up to the latest Wordpress releases.

Any basic hosting plan on this list will be fine with Wordpress, but expect to stop or revert Wordpress versions if you go with this as your CMS.

🤝 You don't have to go it alone - While free hosts may be more limited, paid hosting on a web server will generally allow you to create different subdomains, or attach additional purchased domains to any folders you make. If you have other comic-making friends you know and trust, you can share your server space and split the cost!

Want to share your experience?

Feel free to contribute your hosting pros, cons, and quirks on our survey! We will be updating our list periodically with your feedback!

[the-bar-sinister]

So out of curiosity what are you using to make your webbed site???

Maybe it's because we're used to microlabel communities but we usually see carrds or rentrys, yours looks more like a neocities or uhhh we forgot the name of it but the blog platform also owned by tumblrs — OH WE MEAN WORDPRESS. Yours looks like a WordPress or a NeoCities.

We definitely do not have the coding skills necessary to make something so smooth looking but like, your site looks cool. ^.^;;;;

Thank you so much for the kind words <3

It's a wordpress! And actually it takes absolutely zero coding, it's as easy as setting up a tumblr.

This is what my back end looks like.

I use wordpress because it's what I've been using for over a decade, its open source and highly customizable, I can take it anywhere, I can put as much content on it as I want, and I can arrange that content however best pleases me. *puts fingers together ominously*.

In my online world, it's always 2010 ;)

OH OH.

Important clarification though!!

"wordpress.com" is owned by the same guy as tumblr.

"wordpress" the content management system (which I use) is free and open sources, and is NOT owned or affiliated with wordpress.com or the guy that owns tumblr.

[stjohnstarling]

Full text of article as follows:

Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. 

The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn’t supposed to. It is not clear from Gage’s post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent. 

Gage wrote: 

“the way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included:

private posts on public blogs

posts on deleted or suspended blogs

unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered)

private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)

posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know)

content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.”

Gage’s post makes clear that engineers are working on compiling a list of post IDs that should not have been included, and that password-protected posts, DMs, and media flagged as CSAM and other community guidelines violations were not included.

Automattic plans to launch a new setting on Wednesday that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and internal documents. A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states that “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.” 

404 Media has asked Automattic how it accidentally compiled data that it shouldn’t share, and whether any of that content was shared with OpenAI. 404 Media asked Automattic about an imminent deal with Midjourney last week but did not hear back then, either. Instead of answering direct questions about these deals and the compiling of user data, Automattic sent a statement, which it posted publicly after this story was published, titled "Protecting User Choice." In it, Automattic promises that it's blocked AI crawlers from scraping its sites. The statement says, "We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control. Our partnerships will respect all opt-out settings. We also plan to take that a step further and regularly update any partners about people who newly opt out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training."

Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?”

Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believepartners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.” Automattic did not respond to a question from 404 Media about whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.

News about a deal between Tumblr and Midjourney has been rumored and speculated about on Tumblr for the last week. Someone claiming to be a former Tumblr employee announced in a Tumblr blog post that the platform was working on a deal with Midjourney, and the rumor made it onto Blind, an app for verified employees of companies to anonymously discuss their jobs. 404 Media has seen the Blind posts, in which what seems like an Automattic employee says, “I'm not sure why some of you are getting worked up or worried about this. It's totally legal, and sharing it publicly is perfectly fine since it's right there in the terms & conditions. So, go ahead and spread the word as much as you can with your friends and tech journalists, it's totally fine.”

Separately, 404 Media viewed a public, now-deleted post by Gage, the product manager, where he said that he was deleting all of his images off of Tumblr, and would be putting them on his personal website. A still-live postsays, “i've deleted my photography from tumblr and will be moving it slowly but surely over to cylegage.com, which i'm building into a photography portfolio that i can control end-to-end.” At one point last week, his personal website had a specific note stating that he did not consent to AI scraping of his images. Gage’s original post has been deleted, and his website is now a blank page that just reads “Cyle.” Gage did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. 

Several online platforms have made similar deals with AI companies recently, including Reddit, which entered into an AI content licensing deal with Google and said in its SEC filing last week that it’s “in the early stages of monetizing [its] user base” by training AI on users’ posts. Last year, Shutterstock signed a six year deal with OpenAI to provide training data.

OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment. 

Updated 4:05 p.m. EST with a statement from Automattic.

[rainbowsky]

OK I've learned a bit more about how deep the cuts were on the recent layoffs, and I'm a lot more concerned than I was before. Please, everyone who has a blog and cares about preserving their content, or anyone who wants to stay connected - take this post seriously and Do The Things.

There's another way that might be easier, depending on your access to an install of WordPress that is not hosted on the WordPress site*.

*Because Automattic - the company that owns Tumblr - also owns WordPress, and if things are going south for them, using the WordPress site might not be any guarantee of safety/backup for your content.

Apparently it's very easy to import all the content from a Tumblr blog to WordPress because they share the same structure/platform. Here's a plugin that can help with that. So if you're able to use WordPress on a hosted or private server, that's an easy option for backing up your blog.

[talenlee]

My Weirdly Embarrassing Love of Spreadsheets

This is gunna be a post about like, the nuts and bolts of making big projects like ongoing writing projects like this blog, but to get there I need to talk to you about silly stuff like journals and buses and spreadsheets. We get there, please, trust me.

One of the first tools I made for blogging was a table in my bullet journal. If you’re not familiar, a common thing to do with bullet journals (or ‘bujos’ as cooler or more tedious people than I call them), is to write up a calendar at the start of each month, something that lists what you’re doing through the course of the month. When I started doing this, I had a way to look at the month, that I could scribble on, so I did, and it meant I was able to get into the habits of putting an article on a game every friday and an article on a story every monday, resulting in my Story Pile and Game Pile series.

This was back in 2017, and the notebooks are in my bookshelf, each of them a record of a year that… huh, I could go back and reread.

Anyway, one of the problems that came up with this system was the bus.

Not kidding.

I would get a bus home from the uni most days. When I was on that bus, or when I was at the uni, I would have time to write, but I wouldn’t necessarily have access to my notebook. I found myself wanting a copy of the chart that I could manage on two different computers – my laptop at the university, and my computer at home. This is how One Stone got written, too, the trips home on the bus being when I wrote the blog posts that became the first chapters of that book, eyes closed, not looking at the screen, and focusing on the road to avoid being car sick.

It is wild to consider how much of my first book I loved writing I did with my eyes effectively closed.

In 2019, I resolved midway through the year that I needed a better system, and started on a system that would handle the transport between two locations better, for the year coming where I anticipated a lot of travel between two sites.

Ahem.

Yeah, uh, 2020.

Anyway, that it wasn’t necessary didn’t stop it being useful! That led to the creation of this Google Sheets spreadsheet:

I made this in Sheets because Sheets is like Excel, which I like using, and it’s like Calc, which I now use, because the version of Excel I pirated doesn’t have access to IFS functions. Point is, this sheet, as originally conceived, did not need anything as a spreadsheet to work; I wanted a table with 365 cells in it that could show the entire year at a glance and be given a simple, straightforward tick or cross. It became something more, as the years progressed.

I’ve been using this kind of spreadsheet now, for 5 years. In 2025, the spreadsheet looks almost the same:

Being a spreadsheet, it is an array of data. You can manipulate that. You can track data in it. You can use indexes. You can cocatenate things, and that’s the stage this spreadsheet is at now. When I sit down to work on a blog post, the first thing I do is not open up WordPress to pull at my drafts, it’s to instead open up this spreadsheet and look at when I have slots available, where my next upcoming gap is, and what kind of thing that gap wants.

Blue slots are story pile, green are game pile. I have all the video article slots pencilled in already with a ‘V,’ on the working version, so I can look at the line of Xes under each date and then see the point where oh, yeah, I gotta work on one of those spots. But see, also, in that top left? That number? The 0 is a count of how many blog posts have been set in place for the year, how close I am to being finished, or on track for the number of days in the year I’m at.

I try to keep the blog progress (blogress) at around 51 posts. That is not because this is the number I’ve decided I need or anything like that, it’s just a round number that makes me happy. Just being able to look at that number and see it being reasonably high? That’s a progress number. I could make it a progress bar proper, with a pair of graphs, but y’know, not worth it. I could make it a fraction too, like, the formula it’s doing over a “/365” if I wanted.

The thing that I’m most happy with though is the cell next to it.

See that cell looks like this:

='Topics & Ideas'!A2

And oh ho what is that?

Well that leads to this:

Here’s what this is: This is a whole spreadsheet of idea categories. Each category has at the top of it, a cell that looks down in the list for a random entry in that list and just provides it. For some things this is a long list of possibilities, for some things this is a tiny list of possibilities. But that is an index function – it looks randomly up and down the list and finds something. That means any time I want something for a specific theme, I can go to this sheet and I’ll see a random selection from these ideas. If I have an idea for a thing to write about at some point, I can jam that in the list, and know that it will eventually be exposed to me at some random point.

Then, at the head of that list, there’s the cell that also randomises the other cells along that horizontal line. Which means that any time I open this blog arranger up, I get to see a random offering of just… anything I could be writing right now. That list can include really broad things, like hey, write about an OC? and sometimes it could be really narrow and specific, like here’s a real event, you know about that one, you should write about it.

Now let me be clear: This is not a tool I recommend for everyone. This is a lot of elaborate effort I put into what is essentially, a producivity toy. This lets me produce a big pile of input and get a random output, and it lets me collect long lists or short lists of things and also, along with all of that, I can just get a periodic output from that list.

The original purpose for this chart wound up being unnecessary. I didn’t need to write on the bus any more. I don’t need to track the post count like this. I don’t need the randomiser. None of this stuff is in any way necessary.

But making this tool though, and playing with it, I have ways to engage with the project of this blog, with the writing when I can’t do that. When my ability to muster words has left me, I have still a chart, a tool, I have productivity items that I can work on. Sometimes just… fine tuning formulas is still working on it.

There’s this idea, maybe you’ve heard of ‘just do a little every day.’ Well, making it so there is a little you can do is really valuable, as part of that.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[leslekieuart]

Hello! I couldn't find where to message you and felt silly to email the question on your business email, so you're absolutely free to ignore this!

Love your comic so so much, your characters are wonderful! As someone who also wants to make a webcomic (traditionally, not like webtoon or tapas or any scrolly place), how did you get your website made up and hosted? I'm always stuck on the details of that stuff. Making the art isn't hard, it's the technical details that I'm too boomer to understand!

Apologies if it's such a weird or awkward question, but thank you for reading nonetheless!

Not a weird question at all, I feel like with large social media platforms being the main places where people post their work, the art of making your own website is truly lost in this day and age (I know I had to fumble a bit to make mine)

I use Bluehost to host my site, and used Wordpress's open source website builder for it. I highly recommend checking out Toocheke, which is pretty much what I used for the framework for my site. I am not a tech savy person (most of my css knowledge was editing my own tumblr back in the day), but toocheke was fairly easy to install and I was able to get most of my problems fixed by light researching.

I would highly advise against trying to make your website on wordpress itself, for some reason toocheke costed more to use since they put custom themes like that behind a paywall on their own built in builder if you decide to host with them.

[gaysamurai]

Kame, who was originally a part of NOT greatest site, backed NGS up on wordpress!