Here’s to the volunteers that come out for the Boston Marathon, all 10,000+ of them.
I’ll be doing radio support this year, just like the blob here.
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Kaitou
Kaitou's experiments in web comics
Although I use RSS to let me know when other webcomics have posted, I usually have my reader go directly to the site rather than pull the article down itself. As a result, I’ve found many sites are not all-client friendly (i.e., they don’t work well with all clients, mine in particular) or they are outright broken. A lot come up with invalid date (usually due to date format problems).
There’s an easy way to check your RSS feed, though; run it through an RSS feed checker. The one I recommend is w3.org RSS validator. Just enter the URL of your RSS feed and see what it comes up with. It could be a pass, a pass with recommendations or it will list bad entries.
Typical problems I’ve seen are bad or problematic date entries. Examples:
- Has a lastBuildDate in the top header, but no pubDate in the entries. This causes all entries to show up on the same date and same time. Unfortunately, this still qualifies as “valid.”
- Has lastBuildDate and pubDate entries, but in the wrong format; e.g., 2014-01-04T00:13:48+00:00. The dates should be in RFC-822 (mail header spec) format like Sat, 04 Jan 2014 13:44:51. Two sites that have this problem are from big, “professional” groups (go figure). I’ve also seen sites where the date is just the date and no time; e.g., Sat, Sept 14 2013.
- Has pubDate, but in not-quite-RFC-822 format, e.g., Sat, 04 Jan 14 13:44:51 where the year is only two digits.
- The RSS link is a web (html) page (this got the site deleted from my RSS feed).
- The site is using feedburner. While “valid”, it breaks a lot of readers. (Mine keeps getting duplicate entries for posts.)
- The site goes someplace strange. I find the best place is the top page. I’ve seen one go to the archives page which uses extra bandwidth and machine load. Another one goes to Yahoo Pipes, which I find even worse.
Fortunately, the RSS code in WordPress generates valid RSS (usually); so, you should be safe if you’re using it with ComicPress, comic-easel or any other plug-in.
It takes less than a minute to check and it may avoid you using some readers; so, give it a try.
I’ve added a Patreon Link page for the webcomics I know that are now using Patreon for funding. You’ll find it under the Resources pull-down on the link bar at the top of the page.
Why am I making this list? Because, frankly, Patreon’s search function sucks.
Well, due to a disk failure, and the need to rebuild my computer, Monday’s comic will be out Monday evening, sometime.
I have preliminary pencils done, but no wording. (And, trust me, you don’t want to see my prelim pencils. I’ve seen a 3 year old’s crayon scrawls that make more sense than these.)
In case you’re wondering what happened to the last two updates, well, Real Life interfered, big time.
Last weekend (4/8 comic):
Decided to get taxes done early (like that worked). Tried an update of Wine (program that lets me run Windows programs under Linux) which hosed my use of Manga Studio 5 to a greater degree than normal. Reverted back to previous version which didn’t put it back like it was. I forget what happened Monday evening. Decided to punt to following weekend…
This weekend (4/15 comic):
Saturday, finished taxes (yay!). Tried to fix basic problem with Wine running MS5; gave up after a while.
Sunday, started on comic, trying to work around existing bug, but needed to get to bed early because I needed to get up early Monday.
Monday: got up early to do ham radio support (net control) for Boston Marathon. I was almost done with my stint (had two stations to close) when the explosions occurred. Stayed another 4 hours. Dropped another ham off at his house on the way home. Still needed to do dinner. Lo-o-o-ong day.
Tuesday and Wednesday evenings are already booked. I also have another comic web site to fix on Thursday (not one of mine).
I still need to fix Wine, but I can probably work around it.