Editing your Comic Info
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ℹ️ Quickstart Tip
If you're setting up comic_git for the first time, and you just want to get started quickly without delving into all comic_git's features, you will only need to edit the [Comic Info] section.
When setting up your web comic, there are some important things you need to do to identify your comic, like give it a name or define what links go in the Links Bar. comic_git also supports a few extra features that can be enabled for your project, like automatically generating thumbnails for your comic pages. All these settings can be adjusted in the your_content/comic_info.ini file.
This file is a standard INI file that you may have seen elsewhere, if you've ever edited config files for other programs. Its format is very simple: it consists of pairs of options and their values (e.g. Title = Sample Comic), and these options are separated into sections (e.g. [Comic Info]).
Each of the sections and their options are described in more detail below.
Quick Links
- Comic Info
- Comic Settings
- Pages
- Links Bar
- Archive
- Image Reprocessing
- RSS Feed
- Transcripts
- Google Analytics
This is the name of your comic. The comic name shows up in the tab every time a page from your website is loaded. (e.g. Page 202 - Sample Comic). It does not have to match the name you gave your repository.
Whatever name or credit you wish to give for the creation of your comic. It can be a single name, a list of names, a sentence, whatever you want. It's currently only used when generating your RSS Feed.
A short, one-sentence description of your web comic. This will show up in your RSS feed and social media previews.
When comic_git encounters a comic with a Post Date set in the future, it will not generate an HTML file for that particular comic. However, if someone understands the layout of comic_git and can guess the pattern you use for naming your comic pages, they can navigate to and pull down things like your comic image file and the meta data that goes with it (e.g., alt text, text post) before the comic is supposed to go live.
By default, this value is set to Github, meaning that the folders (and all image and data files in the folders) for your scheduled posts will be deleted only when built on GitHub. If you build your website locally, these files will not be deleted. Note that this only applies to the files published on GitHub Pages. Your GitHub repository and your local copy will still have these files, so you are not at risk of losing any of your work.
If you set this value to Always, the folders for your scheduled posts will be deleted whenever the website is built, even if it's built locally. This can be useful if you are deploying your website somewhere other than GitHub Pages, but it is risky as you risk losing some work.
ℹ️ Hiding Your Comic
Despite the scheduled post protection above, any scheduled posts you want to hide from the public are still available to anyone who visits your GitHub page, if they know where to look. If you wish to make your scheduled posts completely hidden from the general public, you will need to set your repository to Private by clicking the Change Visibility button in your GitHub settings for your repository. To make your repository private AND publish it to GitHub Pages, though, you will need to upgrade to GitHub Pro. However, this cost is lower than most other hosting options out there ($4/month vs Squarespace's $12/month), so I would suggest this is not a big downside.
This is the date format that all your comic Post dates will be in. By default, they're similar to July 20, 1969. It's necessary that all Post dates use the same format, so that comic_git knows how to organize your posts chronologically.
The following table is a list of common date format strings. You can copy/paste any of these into the Date format option to change what date format to use in your comic files. (See Adding Comic Pages) for more info on setting the Post dates for your comics)
| Format string | Example |
|---|---|
| %B %d, %Y | July 16, 1969 |
| %Y-%m-%d | 1969-07-16 |
| %a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S | Wed, 16 Jul 1969 04:20:00 |
You can also build your own format strings. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html#time.strftime for the list of %-substitutions you can use.
The timezone for all the dates in your comic. This is important for when comic_git is determining when scheduled posts should be published. For example, if you push out an update at 9pm your time just before the midnight deadline, you don't want comic_git to publish the page right away just because it's past midnight in some other timezone!
All timezones found in the "TZ database name" column on this page are allowed.
If you are building your website locally, and you haven't configured a custom domain, you must set this so that comic_git knows what domain to use to build the URL to link to your comic, for the purposes of things like your RSS feed and your social media preview links. For more details, see Building Your Website Locally.
This option should include your website's entire domain, subdomain, and top-level domain. Do not include the slash at the end. You may include the "http://" or "https://" if you wish.
Examples: http://ryanvilbrandt.github.io, www.tamberlanecomic.com
If you are building your website locally, and you have not set a custom domain, you must set this to the name of your GitHub repository. This allows most of the links on your website to function properly. For more details, see Building Your Website Locally.
This option should not include leading or trailing slashes.
Examples: comic_git, tamberlane
If you are building your website locally, or you've set up a custom domain, setting this to True will force any URLs pointing to your website to use https:// instead of http://.
This is a special section without pre-defined options. This section tells comic_git what extra web pages beyond the standard comic pages to build. To the left of the equals sign is the template file name to use, to the right is the title of the page once it's built. If you wish to remove a default web page like tagged pages or the Latest page, delete that line from this section.
For more info on adding pages to your website, see Creating your Own Webpages.
This is another special section without pre-defined options. This section tells comic_git how to build out the Links Bar. To the left of the equals sign is the name of the link as it should show up on the website, to the right is the URL it links to. Any values that start with / will link to a page on your website. All other links will be treated as external links to other websites.
When this value is False, the Archive page will display all the comics in your archive in an unordered list, broken up by storyline. When this value is True, the Archive page will display all the comics in your archive in a grid of comic thumbnails.
When looking for thumbnails, the Archive page will check the info.ini file for the Filename for a given comic, then look for the thumbnail image by replacing the normal file extension with _thumbnail.jpg. For example, a thumbnail for Page_197.png should be found in the same folder with the name Page_197_thumbnail.jpg.
You can either create your own thumbnails, or use comic_git's built-in thumbnail generation, described in the [Image Reprocessing] section below.
This is the format that post dates will be displayed in when Use thumbnails is set to True. This is defined separately because longer post dates can screw up the spacing of the thumbnails in the grid. It accepts the same inputs as the Date format in the [Comic Settings] section.
If set to True, thumbnails will be generated for each comic page. They'll be named the same as the comic page, except replacing the normal file extension with _thumbnail.jpg. For example, a thumbnail for Page_197.png will be found in the same folder with the name Page_197_thumbnail.jpg.
The size of the thumbnail to be generated. This can be either a width/height pair in pixels like 100, 36 or a percentage of the size of the original image like 10%.
If set to True, lower quality versions of each comic page will be generated. They'll be named the same as the comic page, except adding _low_quality before the file extension, and possibly using a new file extension depending on what you have set for "Low-quality file type" below. For example, a low quality version of Page_197.png will be found in the same folder with the possible name Page_197_low_quality.jpg.
Note: Not yet in use.
The file type to use for the low quality version of the image. All major image formats are supported, like PNG, JPG, and GIF. JPG is recommended, as it provides the lowest file sizes without sacrificing too much image quality.
The DPI to use for the low quality version of the image. A lower value means a lower quality image, but a smaller file size.
If this is set to False, and a thumbnail or low quality image file already exists in the comic page's folder, comic_git will not attempt to recreate the thumbnail/low quality image. If set to True, comic_git will always attempt to generate a thumbnail or low quality image, assuming creating these files is enabled via one of the options above.
If set to True, comic_git will attempt to create a Transcripts section below every comic that has transcripts files provided for it. A transcript file is a text file with the name of the language as its filename, e.g. English.txt. The transcript file can contain plain text, unicode (for those fancy accents and non-roman alphabets) and HTML tags.
If this value is empty, comic_git will search in each comic folder for any *.txt files (except for post.txt) and any it finds it will add to the list of available transcripts. If you wish to move the transcripts to their own folder, you can define that folder here. Each page must have a separate folder that matches the comic folder name. For example, if you set the transcripts folder to be your_content/transcripts, then the transcript files for Page 197 should be found at your_content/transcripts/Page 197/.
If defined, any transcript *.txt file will be moved to the top of the list of transcripts, and thus will automatically be loaded whenever the comic page is loaded. The default value for this is "English".
If you have set up a Google Analytics for your comic, you can put the Tracking ID here (e.g. UA-123456789-0) and comic_git will automatically insert the analytics tracking code on all pages of your website.