New Site == broken RSS feed

[Sukotto]

For a long time, I've used Comic Alert to notify me when a new comic is up. It looks like the new site design has broken their feed
http://www.comicalert.com/comics/6019-errant-story/

Would you guys please consider starting your own RSS feed (or at least tell the comic alert guys to fix theirs)?

That would be great since I (and many people like me) basically live in my RSS reeder now (case in point, it's been 22 days since I was last notified of an Errant Story update and I only just noticed now).

Edit: I created, and have been using this feed: http://feed43.com/errant-story.xml

[Imp-Chan]

We are in fact planning to put up an RSS feed of our own in the nearish future.

We just have to figure out exactly what we want it to feed, and how to make it do that... we were thinking announcements, news, and comics, and sending just an alert when it updates rather than the actual image/text.

Incidentally, just to check... they're not making our comics actually appear on the favorites list, right, they're just posting links rather than yanking our content? I know they've got a ton of mild copyright violations all over their site, but as long as it's directing readers to our actual pages and not directly yanking too much of our content I don't see any reason to pursue it.

^-^'

[Sukotto]

We are in fact planning to put up an RSS feed of our own in the nearish future.

We just have to figure out exactly what we want it to feed, and how to make it do that... we were thinking announcements, news, and comics, and sending just an alert when it updates rather than the actual image/text.

Seems to me you want to:

1. Inform people that you have new content
2. Entice them to come to your site to view it
3. Have them join your cult and slavishly give you all their money

So I think you probably don't want to include full articles or images in your streams.

My first choice would be to have one feed for just comics (linking directly to the relevant archive page for each one like Order of the Stick / Erfworld for example http://www.giantitp.com/comics/comics.rss ); one for news/conventions/articles; one for public events/fan events; and a master list that brings them all and in the darkness bind them.

Second choice would be just a single feed with some sort of keyword at the start of each title so I can filter/sort them "News", "Comic", "Event", etc. Like Looking for Group does (though they include images which I don't like and filter out) http://feeds.feedburner.com/LookingForGroup?format=xml

In either case, I personally don't like getting the comic as part of the feed (though I know people that do). The major thing for me is that the link points to the actual page where I can find the comic/article/etc instead of some kind of landing page. (<rant>Pisses me off when I click the last three links from a blog and they all go to the same landing page rather the relevant article</rant>)

Incidentally, just to check... they're not making our comics actually appear on the favorites list, right, they're just posting links rather than yanking our content?

Correct. Their rss feed, at least, just provides text links like "Errant Story for 2007/09/04" and does not hotlink your images. I haven't spent time looking elsewhere on their site, but they claim that they do not steal anything and that they just point people to the artist's website.
More info here: http://www.comicalert.com/faq-owners.php

I'd rather have a separate feed for each comic I read (straight from each artist), but gotta live with what I can get

[Imp-Chan]

Okay, I need to correct what I said before about "soon." Originally, the plan was to have our tech guy put one together for us real quick, but it turns out there's a problem with that.

See, I've just been reviewing invoices from the aforementioned tech guys. Getting the new site design up and running, since we had someone a friend recommended encode my site design for us (originally he was supposed to build the whole site at a vastly reduced hourly rate, but his job got in the way so he had to stop after getting the basic layout mostly working), took up a LOT of hours, at a whole lot of money per hour (at least by our standards). As a result, my tech guy budget has been well and truly blown until sometime in Spring of next year (though if I'm lucky we'll make enough on the holidays to start work on server upgrades in January). So, I can't just have the tech guy do it for me as originally planned (sorry, Pat, but I know you like to be paid).

Now, I keep reading documentation that says it's EASY to create an RSS feed yourself, but so far, I must confess that I'm not really understanding it. I don't use them myself, so I've got no real internalized understanding of how they work or what they're supposed to do. I've checked the links you gave, and looked at various other feeds, but honestly I can't figure out how they're supposed to save time over just checking the websites, and I definitely don't understand how to automate them or whatever it is one does that would make ours handy for us to use and so forth. In short, I am clueless, and while I'm sure I'd eventually figure it out on my own by reading the zillion and one websites a quick Google search turns up, it'd help if someone treated me like the backwards, technology idiot I really am and walked me through it all from the beginning. Then, maybe I can finally actually DO something about this RSS thing folks have been asking for since last summer.

-_-'

[Viking-Sensei]

I wish I could help, but as much as I *do* know about coding and stuff, I don't know crap about RSS feeds. I'll do some digging. In the meantime, I think Sukotto should write the comicalert guys and point out that the site's changed so they'll update their targets. The Walrus system ought to be fully compatible... if it isn't yet, when Newbs shows back up with Walrus 3 I'll talk to him about it. If we're really hard up, Vikingspace's tech guy Jo might be able to help. He owes me a favor or three.

[Sukotto]

I already submitted their "oh no, the website changed around and the feed's busted" form. Hope they fix it.

I'm sure you guys are using a database backend for your news and stuff. PHP is supposed to have a couple of reasonable RSS libraries. Shouldn't be hard for a developer to spit out a simple feed. How much they'd charge you for it is a different matter.

[Sukotto]

I've had no response from the Comic Alert guys so I took the liberty of creating a temporary RSS feed using the freebie Feed43 service.
The feed is text-only (it doesn't look at the images at all) and will, at MOST, poll once every 6 hours (depends on how often people reload the feed in their newsreaders)

If you guys strongly object to this I will not be offended if you remove the urls out of this post. (Or the whole post I guess). I hope though, that you will see it as yet another way to get people coming to your website.

Feed here: http://feed43.com/errant-story.xml

Service FAQ here: http://feed43.com/faq.html

If you're interested in seeing what it looks like in a reader, I like http://bloglines.com or http://www.igoogle.com


I only just set the feed up so I'll have to see how well it tracks over the next week to make sure it correctly captures each new comic link as it comes out. Once you have your own feed(s) up and running I'll gladly delete this one.

[yamamkota]

Now, I keep reading documentation that says it's EASY to create an RSS feed yourself, but so far, I must confess that I'm not really understanding it. I don't use them myself, so I've got no real internalized understanding of how they work or what they're supposed to do. I've checked the links you gave, and looked at various other feeds, but honestly I can't figure out how they're supposed to save time over just checking the websites, and I definitely don't understand how to automate them or whatever it is one does that would make ours handy for us to use and so forth. In short, I am clueless, and while I'm sure I'd eventually figure it out on my own by reading the zillion and one websites a quick Google search turns up, it'd help if someone treated me like the backwards, technology idiot I really am and walked me through it all from the beginning. Then, maybe I can finally actually DO something about this RSS thing folks have been asking for since last summer.

Well I'll try explaining what RSS feeds are and why people use them (oddly enough I don't use them much, -.-).

Let's say you have 20 blogs you read regularly but these blogs update at all sorts of odd times (sometimes on schedule, sometimes not). Now normally you could just open them all up every day (or more often), check each one, see if you've already read the current post, read any new things then go to the next blog. Now what if you have 200 blogs and only want to read certain types of articles from each one? Then it goes from mildly annoying to very annoying to keep track of it all.

Now it'd be great if your computer could just tell you when a new post shows up to one of those blogs or even just show you all the new posts every day (that you haven't read yet). So instead of wasting time checking 190 blogs that you've already read you can just check the 10 that have new things. Also if you're OCD you can read those new articles as soon as they show up without having to check 200 website every 10 minutes. Unfortunately computers are stupid, I think a goldfish has more brainpower than the average pc, so they basically can't do any of that on their own.

RSS is the solution, in a way. RSS feeds are just text files that a computer can easily understand. They simply say what the main content of a website is (or newest content) in an format that computer programs can understand. So a computer program can easily look at such a file and say, for example, that a new article was posted 1 hour ago and that it was about walruses. A user would have a program on their PC that just looks at these text files every 10 minutes on all those 200 blogs and from that it can tell the user what new posts there are.

[sanloublues]

Personally, I think the easiest way to get rss is to use the dinosaur comics guy's rsspect. You can put the span tags that wrap your news or comics in your template without affecting the display for normal readers ( http://www.rsspect.com/markup.php ) and then he hosts the rss and updates it. Course, I'm trying to use the anysite feed to get notices whenever ES updates now and it hasn't shown any updates since last week It works well for sam and fuzzy though.