So last week, after you read my column, you went out and asked your friends about which webcomics they read, right? You’ve looked up some of them and decided that some of these are pretty good. Now what? I mean, you don’t have them delivered to your doorstep every morning like a newspaper and many of them don’t have printed collections available at bookstores, so how are you supposed to continue reading them day after day?
The first, and most obvious, solution is to simply bookmark the main page of the site with your browser and manually return to it every day. It could be part of a morning ritual: sit down at the computer with your coffee and hit all the sites you’ve bookmarked, one at a time. There are a few challenges with that approach, however. First is that you need to remember to do that. Eventually, it could become habit enough that clicking through all your favorites is a rote exercise, but that will take some time to learn that behavior. The second issue is that you have to use the same browser on the same computer all the time. If you’re borrowing a friend’s laptop or are at the library, your bookmarks won’t be available to you.
While those first two issues are at least somewhat under your control, this third one isn’t. The comic might not be updated daily. Most webcomic creators do not earn their living off their comics and have to squeeze in time to write, draw, upload and publicize their work after they’ve already put in an eight or ten hour day doing something unrelated to comics. So it’s not uncommon for them to keep their comics on an alternate schedule. Maybe they only have new comics every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (e.g. The Adventures of Dr. McNinja). Maybe only Sunday (e.g. Tozo, the Public Servant). Perhaps they don’t maintain a regular schedule at all, and only put comics out when they have a chance, sometimes going months between updates (e.g. Dresden Codak)!
Fortunately, those same computers that are so great at automating things have ways of streamlining your webcomic reading!
Many, I daresay most, webcomics are published on their respective websites through a system that incorporates at least one form of a web feed. A web feed is essentially the updated content of a website, but without things like the navigation or cool header graphics or the small print at the bottom; it’s just the meat of the site.
These web feeds are useful, then, because they can be accessed remotely and automatically without the user having to head over to the site him or herself. A computer can go check on the feed, grab the latest updates, reformat them into something readable and then present that back to the user. Programs that do that are generally called Feed Readers or Aggregators. What makes these Feed Readers particularly clever is that they can pull feeds from multiple sources and they can keep track of which ones you’ve looked at!
Which means that you can get dozens or even hundreds of comics that have these feeds all delivered to one spot, and each one is automatically marked as you read it. It’s easy, then, to see which you’ve read and which you haven’t. Plus you don’t have to keep track of what every comics’ schedule is; the Reader just displays new comics as they come in!
There are all sorts of Readers out there; I suggest just searching on “feed reader” and the name of whatever system you’re using to find one best suited for your situation. Readers are available for, I think, all computer operating systems and most smart phones. What’s more critical for you is what to look for on the comics’ sites.
The most common form of web feed is RSS, often linked on sites via an orange icon like the one shown here. Copy the link and drop it into your reader, and you should start seeing the latest comics rolling in. Atom and XML are two other common formats and, for most people’s purposes, work pretty much the same as RSS. (Trust me, you don’t want me to bore you with the differences here. For what we’re talking about, you probably won’t notice or care.) In some cases, the links are simply designated by the name of the feed type: RSS, XML or Atom. You can actually open these feeds in your browser, but it takes a Feed Reader to read them properly. So if you see this...
… just hit your back button and right-click the link again to copy the URL for your reader.
There are other options available, some also taking advantage of the feed systems, but let’s hold off on those for the time being. There are a lot of options available and different avenues to cover, so it’s easy to get lost if we charge in too quickly! Plus, I need something to talk about in future columns!
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