Patch ArcanaI AM ABSOLUTELY BEGGING Y'ALL.
If you are bringing back personal/hobby/small-business websites (and you should be), enable RSS.
And TLS, but that's a whole other thing.
Stellarator 🏳️🌈🌮@patcharcana Ooh, ooh! My newish comic website has both of those! As semi-furry/furry-adjacent, I believe this entitles me to headpats. :)
Seriously though, preach it. RSS is great and everywhere should use it. I follow many feeds myself.
Jamey Sharp@stellarator offers headpats
As someone who especially wants to see RSS and TLS in webcomics and other serialized works, thank you 😁
I've additionally been trying to advocate for full-history RSS feeds (https://toot.cat/@jamey/110612165540982772). Many webcomic creators I've talked with don't know what RSS is or why they would care, which is perfectly understandable, but since you do I'm curious what you think about the usual 10-post limit in most RSS feeds.
Jamey Sharp (@[email protected])
As I'm seeing an uptick in discussion about RSS again I guess I should try again to see if anyone else wants RSS feeds with more history than the newest 10 posts. RFC5005, "Feed Paging and Archiving", provides a comprehensive and well-designed mechanism for this. It was published in 2007 but has never had significant adoption that I can find. I've written a few implementations: a jekyll-feed PR (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed/pull/236), a WordPress plugin (https://github.com/jameysharp/wp-fullhistory), a proxy that adds history to unmodified WordPress feeds (https://github.com/jameysharp/wp-5005-proxy), and a simple demo of generating full-history feeds (https://github.com/jameysharp/predictable). I also wrote a blog post with a technical take on the connection between cache coherency and full-history feeds: https://jamey.thesharps.us/2020/08/06/feed-reader-cache-coherency/
Yay! :D
I was not aware of that limitation, but I also wasn't aware that you could have your feed have the FULL comics. That sounds like a neat idea, but wouldn't that totally spam to death any new subscriber? I'm currently at 280 pages.
But yeah, I got my own website and RSS feed because I absolutely hate reading comics via a daisy-chain of links on an image board, and I assumed other people did also.
@stellarator The exact limit is usually configurable depending on what software you run your site with; WordPress and others just default to the newest 10 posts. I know of one webcomic where the author hand-edits the RSS feed for every new post and has the complete history there (I think 700+ pages when I looked a few years ago), but that's unusual because having a single large feed is expensive in bandwidth costs. However, it's common among podcasts; somebody told me why, but I forget.
The method I advocate for still only has, say, 10 posts in the main feed, but that feed links to a series of older feed documents containing the rest of the history. That solves the problem of bandwidth costs, though it introduces some new complexities. To my dismay, it's not at all widely implemented, despite the standard for it having been published in 2007. (!)
I see the problem of how to present all that history to people as a separate issue: we have to have the data available before we can have a good conversation about what interaction modes work best with it. But I do have opinions about how to present webcomic history to readers, since I built a site which does that, 15 years ago 😁 (https://www.comic-rocket.com)
@jamey If I understood the link you sent correctly, this isn't something a person could just do, but something that would have to be added to the spec and used by RSS readers? Or do I misunderstand.
I don't know how far back my site's RSS feed goes. I'd have to check. It's a *super* simple bespoke thing just for my 3 series.
@stellarator Yeah, publishers have to add the right links, and feed readers have to add support for following those links. Neither is common right now so I'm not saying you should go do this immediately or anything, I was just curious what you'd think of it in general. Although there's no harm in adding support: if the feed reader doesn't understand these links then it will still see the newest handful of posts, just like it does today.
@jamey It certainly is an interesting idea. In my case it's probably just as easy to use my website itself, but it still seems like a cool feature for people who would want to use their own readers.