not falling down

Could’ve saved a line if he’d written it in C++.

Update 1636 hrs: Or five lines, in PHP.

Update 10.5.03 1745 hrs: And Leonard points out that unless he puts a newline character in at the end there, it won’t look right at all.

Yeah, this didn’t actually turn out all that terse.

Also! Webcomics are maybe the one source of content with the biggest conflict between proposed and actual posting schedule, which makes them PERFECT for RSS feeds… except nobody has one. Okay, Penny Arcade does, but they never miss a day anyway. Even Keenspot and Keenspace, the people who get probably half of all webcomic traffic in the world (and write the software that implements probably 80% of all webcomics), don’t have any kind of update feed.

So they should, basically, is what I’m saying. It’s called Really Simple Syndication, you know, it can’t be that hard to add in.

(Yes, I realize that my comic probably needs it more than anyone’s. I do plan to add one, once I have the time to rewrite my entire site apparatus. But again: I’m lazy.)

My RSS aggregator is now officially aggregating 39 blogs. Granted, a lot of those are dormant, but that’s still not bad for something that started as an experiment while I was bored at work.

Things I want to change about it:

• This is a third-party aggregator, so I have to wait for it to update itself, which it does only once an hour. For petesakes, that’s a possible 59 minutes of tardiness on late-breaking bruisable news! I should either write my own or find software I can install on my own site, but I’m lazy.
• Thirty-nine? Come on! Somebody start a new blog, I want to round it off. No, not a blogspot, they don’t let you have a feed unless you pay money.
• (Or, if your name is Kristofer Straub, you could get on the stick already and install some journal software with feeds and also real permalinks.)

I know thirty-nine isn’t actually a particularly large field for an aggregator, but it works nicely for me. It was pretty boring when I started out, but now there’s a good chance that any hour I hit it will yield at least one new post.

Then again, probably every other post on the thing is by somebody about whom I once wrote. She mostly talks about TV shows and half-baked politics, so I could just delete her, but I keep the feed around anyway out of a kind of sick fascination. (I do the same with one other blog, about which Sumana and Stephen [both of whom are highlights of my aggregator] have already questioned me. Can you figure out which one?)

Speaking of Sumana, I think her blog caught notfallingdownitis–none of her CGIs work on her server all of a sudden, so there is a drought of Sumanews. This makes life less fun. Somebody fix Sumana’s CGIs now, please!

(Ha ha! “Sumanews.”)

Didn’t faint.

Gonna go give blood now.

Kind of worried that it’s gonna hurt.

More worried about what all the no-sleep toxins in my blood are going to do to whoever gets it.