E-Mail:

Call for Comic Strips

What's your favorite section of the Sunday paper? If you're at all like me, you flip to the comics first. I can't think of a better content-type that's ripe for RSS. I scoured the Web to see which strips were supporting this rich syndication format. To my surprise, I found very few. Am I missing something here? Where are they? I don't want to subscribe to e-mail newsletters anymore. I don't wanna rely on unofficial workarounds. Have you found anything worth aggregating? UPDATE: Doctor Fun, Sev, Cox & Forkum, Dave Bort, Irregular Webcomic

GoDaddy Web hosting plans are now more powerful than ever. Best of all, their plans start at just $3.95/month! No matter what plan you choose, your site receives 24/7 maintenance and protection in a world-class data center. Plus, as a listener of The Chris Pirillo Show, enter code CHRIS2 when you check out, and save an additional $5 off any order of $30 or more. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy!

26 Comments

If I'm a comic strip syndicator, I can't think of a reason why I'd give away my content for free via RSS — a distribution format which does not require the subscribers to give you any information about themselves. I am not a big fan of the cluttered html newsletters the comics send out now, but without asking people to sign up using their email address so that there is an opportunity to contact subscribers and try to sell them something, giving away comics for free makes no sense whatsoever. Or am I missing something?

Where's the love, man? Sometime you gotta give stuff away free out of the goodness of your heart. and then i wake up.

I use a program called “comic Reader” when you first fire it up you fill out a form stateing which comics you want. then every time after that it goes and get's them for you , only takes seconds to work plus it gets daily and weekend comics for most major news papers
hope this helps

Chris, talk to Josh from 10500bc.org. I know he's done a few scripts that will pull comic strips into an XML feed. Here (http://www.10500bc.org/twiki/bin/view.cgi/Main/WebHome) is a list of the ones he has done.
I personally would just like to see Garfield with a RSS feed.

tsigo, check the link I put above. Josh has a script to make a RSS feed out of Penny Arcade.

Here are some more…. :)
http://www.pft.com/~makali/

with rss feeds, I meant… :/

For the guy who wanted Garfield…
http://dwlt.net/tapestry/garfield.rdf
:)

YOU have a problem with e-mail newsletters? how Ironic, and funny :P j/k

I know I've been guilty for not coming up with an RSS feed for my boyfriend's comic (http://thegeekout.com), but fact is I know too little about the code to get it right. He did eventually get a file up, but he sorta incorporated the image into the description tag, which isn't right. I'll surf around a bit and see what I can come up with though.

Okay, I just figured out how to do the image in RSS. Now I have to figure out a way that this can be done without having to re-enter the code and re-upload the file manually every single time…

I've found about 8 or 9 “unofficial” Dilbert feeds. I know you were bemoaning the lack of official feeds, but from a viewer's perspective, if the feed works, unofficial is as good as official :P

****, that second one didn't come true properly. It's:
http://home.rayslinky.com/getfuzzy.xml

Blowing my own trumpet here I guess (although Tina already mentioned my Garfield feed - thanks!), but you can find more at http://dwlt.net/tapestry/.

I think RSS' real potential (as far as comics go, at least) is for webcartoonists. There are quite a few programs out there that rip webcomics from their home site, which has some webcartoonists up in arms because we rely on our readers to visit the site for everything from moral to financial support; many webcartoonists view these programs as little more than a drain on bandwidth (although, for upstarts like myself, any publicity is good publicity). While not preferable to having folks actually drop by our site, at least RSS feeds allow us to add a little blurb of text to our comics. Of course, who am I to talk…my RSS feed doesn't yet include my comic and I've got a plugin for “iComic” on my home page.

I vote for Sluggy Freelance…http://sluggy.com/

Where is Garfield?

“I don't want to subscribe to e-mail newsletters anymore.”
Don't you find this hypocritical as you yourself started out sending and receiving e-mail newsletters, what's more you started your whole online embargo with e-mail newsletters. So to say that you no longer want to subscribe to them…..

To the last Chris who posted… times change. It's not hypocritical or ironic… it's how the online world has changed. If you'll listen to what Chris (Pirillo) has to say in the coming months, or if you've been paying attention to what he's been saying in his newsletters, you'll understand why this is his new position on e-mail newsletters.

I'm not denying that times do change, I'm simply stating that it's still wrong of Chris (Pirillo) to knock something of which he built his “empire” upon.

Generally I've seen comic artists upset about it because they *aren't* paying for the hosting themselves, and if people don't see the banners, it sorta takes away from the advertisers who are paying for their bandwidth. If there's a way to do it with the advertisers support, so that you see the ads of the sponsors, then perhaps more comics would be available. I don't know of many artists who can afford to host the stuff on their own.

Check out the Houston Chronicle they will let you make your own comics page. Select what you want, Bookmark the first page and all your comic dreams will come true :-)
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/comics/archive/showComics.hts

Modern Tales has syndication for quite a large number of comics. Its not rss though - its javascript based seems to be designed to deliver comic to web pages rather than a news feed aggregator. List here;
http://www.moderntales.com/tooncast_list.php

What Do You Think?

 
Blog Widget by LinkWithin