Every Comic, One URL

I write a lot of programming comics and collect them into zines sold at wizardzines.com. Historically, the individual pages went up on Twitter as I finished them. That worked for posting, but it failed at just about everything else:

  • Discovery is hopeless. Finding the page about socat means guessing the exact words I used in the original tweet, then digging through unrelated results.
  • Linking is clunky. Twitter is not a great interface for permanent references.
  • Updates were impossible. No edit button means a corrected page stays wrong forever.
  • Orphaned work was invisible. I wrote 12 pages of a sequel to “bite size linux” that never shipped, plus a few Kubernetes pages that won't make it into a zine. All effectively unfindable.

The fix was straightforward: put everything at predictable URLs like wizardzines.com/comics/socat. Now (almost) all of it lives in one place at wizardzines.com/comics.

Search That Actually Works

With 273 comics, a flat list isn't enough. I added a lightweight search using list.js:

The search matches against titles plus a few manually curated keywords, so “dns” turns up the page on “authoritative nameservers”. I wrote a custom matching function that anchors at word boundaries, which keeps a query for “tar” from returning “start”.

If you're curious about that unfinished sequel, searching “linux2” will surface those pages.

What’s Missing

Not everything made the cut. Zine introductions and conclusions usually don't stand alone as comics, so they're excluded. Many pages from the free zines are also absent for the same reason — although that may change.

Other gaps I expect to fill in later:

Why It Took This Long

Technically, this was not a hard change. It took some Python scripts and a small search function. The real blocker was hesitation: if all the comics are freely available, would anyone still buy the zines?

This week I decided to stop worrying about that. Being able to point at any comic with a stable link is worth it. The zine business is healthy, and it's better to operate with a spirit of abundance than scarcity.