Managing both an art gallery on your own site and on the HalfMoon Art Hub?

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I don't know how's the situation for other Melonlanders... so I thought it'd be a good idea to ask! 

How do you use the HalfMoon Art Hub? (the art section here on the forums!)
Do your gallery here and on your website match? Or is one of them the main one? If so, how do you use the other one and why?

I love the HalfMoon Art Hub a lot, tho I don't know what kind of use would I give it yet. Most of my art is in my own website, and for a good reason: it's an archive of all my art, even the most humble of napkin doodles go there. I wouldn't put that strain on the forum's servers 

So instead, I've been using it to try things out and share especially  "retro-web"   kind of art. I especially like how artwork with transparency looks since there's a nice drop shadow (I could add one to my site... but the background is mostly black  ) Maybe I could use it to display my best art pieces or the ones most important to me, but on one hand, I don't know if I'm up to that task (are you making me choose between all my children?  ); and on the other, I don't really want to delete what's already there. I appreciate the comments... my art on my site doesn't have comments.

So, do you give the HalfMoon Art Hub a particular use and why? Please share with us! 

[xwindows]

I have my own hand-crafted personal art site operating under another online identity; so no, it's unlikely that I would ever use the Art section here.

Side note: I also don't have attachment to MelonLand's aesthetics. In fact, I need to douse MelonLand with heavy doses of CSS overlays to make it usable under my setup.

Anyway, if I would be posting any art-tangent stuff that I would show people here, I would rather post it on my own personal website, and link that here. My Atom feed-based pseudo-Instagram is an example of such art which I share here.

On the question in general, I'm one of the amateur artists who have used centralized art platform before. I liked that I could find many artists that I like in one place, in the same interface, as well as with decent ability for me to search for artworks I desire-- which are in turn, chances for me to discover new artists which I might like.

But after the half-decade-long tension of daily bitter fights between what I expect of the web vs. the technical direction which mainstream web have been heading to in general, I witnessed DeviantART's Eclipocalpse going down. That was the point I decided that I had enough with mainstream centralized art platform, and spent several years rebuilding my gallery from scratch, by hand (from concept, files layout, page design, to every line of code), hosted within a long-forgotten world of communal timesharing computing system which their entry being hidden from the uninitiated, behind the command line interface.

It is a place where I have control over how (2) and who I serve my art to. While it's not as much control as self-hosting, it is a place with as much control as one could have without spending monies or tying real-life identity to it.

While I looked back to those centralized platforms sometimes, I would say that overall, I don't regret leaving. Being an introvert, I don't crave the "Likes, Subscribes, and Comments" that much. And in these days and age where art-laundering cartels (1) run amok, fine-grained control over art serving is paramount; and I'm not willing to give up that control in exchange of what's so-called "exposure"-- especially when an off-site link (and maybe small thumbnail) (3) should have been enough as a vehicle of sharing, like they were commonly-accepted in the World Wide Web of old.


(1) Usually euphemized as "generative AI" by their proponents. In general, I suggest that you use the word "content launderer" for this, instead of such euphemism.

(2) Which I nitpick a lot of things, from the availability of plain olde HTTP, straightforward path naming schemes, NoScript compatibility, longevity of URL and identifiers, compliance to proper long-standing standards (like HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1), usability in plain-HTML view (like text mode browsers). Pretty much all art platforms today (and the Art section here is no exception) fail at least one of these points-- usually all of these points at once too, as far as I have looked.

(3) In in case of following, web feed. (Preferably an Atom feed)

[larvapuppy]

I use the Art Hub the same way I used to use DeviantArt, so I've just been posting anything I want to share here, including doodles and photos. On my website I have separate pages for finished artwork, doodles, photos, and free graphics.

I think the only difference is the timing. I usually post here first because it's easier (I just need to upload rather than compress, make the thumbnail image, then upload both, then edit my html). I will usually wait to post to my website until I have 2 or more new pieces to show. Maybe I should change that? My website would be updated more often if I did.

I don't really think that hard about what I want to show on here vs what I want to show on my website because my main goal isn't to direct traffic to my site. But I think my site is more consistent and organized; there are some pieces I've uploaded to my site that I've forgotten to upload here.

Side note: I miss when the New Art section was near the top of the page