Big Respect For Rsspect
I figured a possible solution to the whole 'crap internet connection' thing that was slowing my viewing of webcomics could be solved by various means. The connection appears to ahve become a little more stable, but the important thing is that I divided up my personal livejournal (which had webcomics in it) and made a new webcomic following livejournal. It's not going to be used to update but the friends page is how I'll be following most comics now.
I went through my bookmarks and found every comic that had a feed already included and added it. However, there are plenty that don't have any feeds. What is a desperate man to do? Rsspect it.
Rsspect is really easy to use. This morning I started making feeds for various webcomics that, for whatever reason, don't have feeds of their own (I made some comments on problems that could arise from LJ feeds before...). It was quick and simple and, apparantly, the new feeds will only point me to the page and not deliver the content.
I'd like sites to do their own feeds, perhaps only linking to new comics so they don't lose revenue that way, but putting their blog posts out over feed would be nice.
So, we'll see how these Rsspect feeds work out once I've add some fully paid LJ friends make proper LJ feeds for me. But it certainly looks promising, helping me only spend the time opening a webcomic page when I know there is something new waiting for me there. In theory this means I'll be able to comment on comics more often.
posted by The Kea @ 11:11 am
2 Comments:
rsspect is a wonderful idea, and when the artists use it ("Mysite feeds", it seems to work fantastically. However, as someone who had a bunch of "Anysite" feeds when it first started, I'm sad to say that part doesn't work all that great. It doesn't update you when the sites change, and, well, it just plain doesn't work. Not that I can really blame Ryan for this: a completely generic site-scrapper is really tough to write. I'm down to just a 'narbonic' anysite feed, that I really only keep to see if it starts working better (so far, it updates the feed about twice a week, for a daily comic...)
In fact, as a result I went on a binge of emailing artists, pointing them to rsspect and politely asking them to consider adding a feed, now that it is so daggone easy. I actually got quite a few (about half of the ones that I emailed) to either add the feed or promise to look into it. In fact, everyone that I emailed was grateful for the heads up, and seemed excited that someone enjoyed their work enough to care. Heck, the only one that didn't respond at all was Howard Tayler, and, well, I emailed him in the week just before his book started shipping. Let's just say I understand how busy he was (is!) and don't hold it against him :-)
For you, I would recommend looking into comicalert.com, something that I had never heard of before I started googling for webcomic rss feeds - despite the fact that I am an avid webcomic reader and have been for 7 or 8 years now. Anyway, they have rss feeds for a *bunch* of comics (including Schlock Mercenary!) and seem to be adding more all the time. Also, you can vote on which comics they should add next. Each comic seems to get it's "own" parser, so it's much more robust. And, like rsspect, it just provides a link so no ad revenue is lost. Highly recommended.
Wow, this is about five times longer than I meant it to be. Oh, well. Good luck on the 'net connection, and have a great day!
I use comic-nation.com. The guys there are pretty cool and they'll fix a site up if the thing stops working. Plus, it's based on a webpage and not on RSS feeds so it's super-easy to check. It works super-well if you have Firefox too.
It has way more comics than COMIC ALERT and they add faster based on your input. My only pet peeve is the ads, which can get annoying.
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