I’m constantly trying to help more people find the joy and happiness that can only found by reading web comics. The problem is, a lot of people not in our little world are tainted by print comics. Print comics may often be trite, cliche and overdone, but they are reliable. People like to know that a new strip will be there for them everyday.
Some strips are really good. They update every day without fail. Other choose a less frequent schedule but still hit each deadline like clock work. Made props goes out to all the work horses our there.
Other strips are a little more hit and miss. But an infrequent update schedule is no reason to ingore an other wise wonderful strip. It is, however, troublesome to constant check a site in hopes that it happened to update.
Many comics are starting to offer RSS feeds to alert readers when a new strip is up. This is a great way to do it, for people who know what RSS stands for.
Clay Yount of Rob and Elliot fame has put his computer skills to good use by providing a handy widget that lets fans of his comic strip that aren’t quite to computer savy.
The widget that can be found and downloaded underneath the most recent strip goes and grabs the most recent comic and allows archive browsing. Nothing world changing, but helpful. The Web needs more things like this. Anything that makes getting comics easier will get our little hooks in more people’s souls. Which is of course is a good thing.
In other news, today you can get the full second issue of DJ Coffman’s Hero By Night online. Also Questionable Content is now sporting a new site design.
There are various other services that leap into this niche. Like The Webcomic List:
http://www.thewebcomiclist.com
Where you can just list your favourites and if you’re logged into your account, it’ll tell you every day which of them have updated. It’s fairly extensive, too, archive-wise.
There’s also ComicAlert! which can be found here:
http://www.comicalert.com/
There you can also list your own comics and it tracks your updates for you, but on top of that it generates an RSS feed of *that*. So you can even use that, if, as you mentioned, you know how to work with RSS.