I haven’t been able to make as much free time as I’d like, but I did manage to find what is proving to be a real time saver. With all of the webcomics I read, checking for updates can be very time-consuming. Especially since many of them don’t provide RSS feeds.
Comic Alert! is a website I found while googling for an RSS feed on a particularly confusing site. Essentially, you sign in (you don’t even need to give an e-mail address) and build a webcomic favorites list.
It will then check the comics for updates and notify you through your choice of three methods:
- Your own custom “all my favorite comics” RSS feed
- A daily e-mail digest (Obviously, requires you to give an e-mail address)
- Your own “These comics have been updated” page complete with thumbnails.
The service is completely free (even from ads, at the moment) and according to the FAQ, they never want to go beyond in-site ads when it comes to getting paid. My favorite part is how it leverages the social aspect of having all those favorites lists on a single site in order to suggest new webcomics. Of course, I already knew about all of the comics It’s recommended to me, I just haven’t had time to try them.
The other potential gains which haven’t really come into their own yet are the “Related Sites”, “Similar Comics”, and “User Reviews” functions. I spent about an hour this morning submitting Wikipedia articles to be added as related links. I just can’t wait for their planned my.comicalert.com feature. Then I’ll be able to let their software automate the task of maintaining a publicly-visible favorites list.
Anyway, subject change: When I came to post this article, I was informed that there was a WordPress 1.2 vulnerability and my blog had been disabled. As such, I finally got upgraded to 1.5. As you may notice, there is no Captcha anymore. I left it that way on purpose in an attempt to goad myself into giving the blog a major overhaul. It’s needed one for a while.
Webcomics, RSS, and updates by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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