RSS Feeds

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Thu Mar 25, 2004 8:22 pm

Did I miss something or does keenspace now have RSS feeds for it's comics?

I've just noticed the file http://ghastlycomic.com/rss.xml in my public directory and I know I didn't put it there.

I also notice the ad banner isn't included in the rss file. Shouldn't it be? The RSS feed is still pulling the bandwidth off my account, shouldn't the ad banner be pulled with it to cover the expense?

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Thu Mar 25, 2004 8:24 pm

Oh, wait. I see now. It's pulling date.html not date.jpg so it would be pulling the ad banner as well as everything else on my archive page.

That's cool then.

Dan Nicholls · Post by **Dan Nicholls** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 2:46 am

Question on RSS feeds, being totally illiterate when it comes to such things: This means that anyone can include it right? So someone can put it on their homepage or something. If progs can nab it...why don't such things as Comictastic besides just being totally anti-ad? Or is that it? In which case, whatever sympathy I *did* have for the guy just dropped to -10.

Phact0rri · Post by **Phact0rri** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 4:59 am

an RSS feed is a sort of news feed syndication sort of thing. it was designed by netscape so news sites could be fed straight to users without going to the site everyday.

it sort of went south for a while but when blogging got big, RSS made a comeback.

RSS are a XML script that breaks pages down to items text blocks for example that call on a specific script. basically what it does in terms of webcomics is call the objects from your website, I'd assume ads/today's comic and people can call on that particular item.

you can use RSS feeds with programs called News Aggregators, and there are bunch of them out. I keep track of Blogs of my friends and a few messages boards using Formzilla, a news Agitator for the Thunderbird e-mail client.

I just tried it out and it works great. I have added all the keenspace comics into its own section... and its pretty neat. makes going through them easier as well.

glad you mentioned this Ghastly.

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 11:49 am

This whole news aggregator thing isn't making any sense. I installed the extension and I setup the subscriptions.txt file but I don't get anything. What should I be seeing?

Phact0rri · Post by **Phact0rri** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 9:52 pm

Faub...

if you are using thunderbird 0.5 it doesn't work on the latest version of TB. I'm using an older one cause all the extensions I like don't work on 0.5 yet. you might want to check out RSS reader for firefox. that might work better if you have a newer thunderbird and the new RSS reader words on FF 0.8

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Fri Mar 26, 2004 10:11 pm

That would be why I wasn't getting anything. I'm using Tbird 0.5. I accidentally installed the Forumzilla on firefox and couldn't figure out what to do with it. Nothing seemed to change. According to the mailing list archives, Forumzilla has stagnated as is not currently being actively developed. What's the new RSS reader for firefox?

YarpsDat · Post by **YarpsDat** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 8:42 am

I don't understand these RSS things.

Someone who knows a bit more about them should askthe comictastic guys about the details so we ("we" as in "we can ask Kisai to do that for us") can set ours to work with it.

Phact0rri · Post by **Phact0rri** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 5:13 pm

For those using firefox

RSS reader is the way to go. It loads up and works on Firefox 0.8, and runs pretty good, I just installed it myself.

http://fls.moo.jp/moz/rssreader.html

for newer Thunderbird nothing seems to work right yet. not even Thundertray, which is a neccessity for me, so I can't use newer thunderbird yet.

Yarps...

I say promote your RSS feed on comic's page. Its a good way to curb comic rippers in my opinion. it also appears RSS is faster (at least for me) in downloading and reading comics.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Sat Mar 27, 2004 6:22 pm

Any online source for us complete dummies?

EDIT: Scrap that, phactori's link is helpfull enough.

Faub · Post by **Faub** » Sun Mar 28, 2004 9:45 pm

Got it to work, thanks phactorri!

Post by **Kisai** » Sun Mar 28, 2004 10:37 pm

Purpose: let's you know when the comic updated so you can visit it

as opposed to

hotlinking the comic directly.