hpr_transcripts/hpr3102.txt

Episode: 3102
Title: HPR3102: RFC 5005 Part 2 – Webcomics, subscribers and feed readers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3102/hpr3102.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:47:11

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3102 for Tuesday, 23 June 2020. Today's show is entitled
RFC 50005 Part 2 Web Comics. Subscribers and feed readers,
it is hosted by Klacky,
and is about 15 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is
fluffy. Jamie and I go on for another 10 minutes about how web comic artists feel about feeds.
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Hi, I'm Klacky. Back in Hacker Public Radio 3082. I interviewed fluffy and Jamie about RFC 505
and how you can use archive data feeds to have the cake and eat it too.
You can give the feed readers of your subscribers a full archive of all your entries
and still keep updates small and quick. We had been talking for half an hour already
and we were just about to round off when I asked this one seemingly innocent question.
Well, you can hear when I'm asking it that I know it's not so innocent.
And it threw us into another 10 minutes of talk about experiences implementing RFC 505
and related issues in particular web comics.
So I think both of you probably have opinions.
We've been talking for a while now, but I would like to add one more thing
before we round this whole thing off.
Headlines or complete articles.
I prefer complete content.
The idea is that if the reader doesn't want the complete content,
they can theoretically find a feed reader that doesn't support that
or let's them collapse it by default or the like.
Having the full content in the feed just makes it a lot more accessible
in terms of people being able to use whatever reader they want.
There's too many uses of the word reader here.
So the user can use whatever reader makes the most sense for their consumption preferences.
The downside, which I mean arguably a downside,
is that full content feeds don't make it as easy to put in ads.
Wow.
For me as a user.
Yeah.
Huge drawback.
Right.
So I guess one thing I talked about is why I care about this.
And it's relevant to my answer to this question,
which is I'm coming at this from the perspective of web comics specifically.
I built a website a number of years ago together with several other people
called comic rocket.
Because I needed to all support for reading my web comics.
And that's the main reason I've used feed readers too.
Yeah.
But in the process of working on comic rocket,
I wound up getting to talk to a lot of web comic creators.
And as a result of that,
I have a lot of sympathy for the position
that some creators really care about controlling the whole experience
that the reader gets, that the person reading gets.
And there are multiple reasons for that.
Probably the most common one is ads,
because it's really hard to make any money doing web comics.
So then ads for the only only common option,
right, which is very disappointing.
But it's helped a lot.
But it's still only for the most successful ones.
Is it anything meaningful?
I mean, ads are also not very useful for the non-popular ones.
I assume as creators, they also care a lot about.
I mean, they designed the whole comic.
And they probably also want to design everything around it
to know exactly how their artist presented the user.
That was the only thing I was going to say exactly.
Yeah, that there's so much design work going into
not just what's inside the comic, but what's around it.
But on the other hand, many of them become quite nerdy
about the technological platform that they deliver over as well, right?
So I guess some of them would care about this.
Not in my experience.
Maybe it's the comics that I read.
But many of them seem to be like tech geeks that discovered
that they can draw.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But when you start looking at comic rock,
it is indexing 30,000 or something web comics.
And that's still a small fraction.
Most of these people are people who have no sense of technology.
They just want to get there out there.
And that's great.
I want these people to be able to get their art out there.
And I want them to be able to find an audience
and ideally make a living until we manage
to dismantle capitalism.
So for me, that's why it's really important,
actually, that they should be using RSS is because
that gives them a kind of control over how their work is presented
while still letting the readers use whatever tools are appropriate for them.
It's, I think, the right balance between the needs of the publisher
and the needs of the reader.
Yeah.
So to round off, if you put all of the content in the feed,
it can become a pretty big feed.
And one argument to just put the subject lines in there could be that,
then the feed is smaller.
But, of course, in the last 45 minutes,
we've been describing what's the solution to this problem.
Right.
Right.
And one problem with having just subjects or even like a small text,
somewhere or whatever is like the presentation of it in the feed reader
isn't always what the cartoonist expects.
So sometimes like there's a few comics where they'll put their commentary
on the comic and that shows up in the feed.
But the comic itself doesn't.
And so then people like the, we'll see a spoiler to the,
to the comic that they haven't read yet.
Or like it'll just look like a headline or, you know,
something that is just easy to skip or miss.
So what I do in, in my comics feed is as a middle ground,
like it'll, like there's a choice of feeds.
One of them is just like the first panel cropped out automatically
or the first panel and a half or whatever it's, it's arbitrary.
And then, and then there's also a full content feed.
You can subscribe to, which gives the comic in total resolution.
From what I can tell everyone just follows me on Twitter anyway.
So do they read the whole comic on Twitter?
No, so Twitter only gets the summary.
It only gets the, it only sees the open graph tag,
which is the same cropping as the, the summary feed.
Okay, so basically you have full content feed and Twitter like feed.
Yes.
And so that's, I mean, that's a pretty common middle ground.
So a lot of, a lot of web comics that use like comic press,
which is a WordPress plugin, they just get a little auto excerpt
or a low resolution version in the feed.
And, and then that will just link to the actual whole size comic.
And that's a pretty standard, pretty standard presentation RSS
or Adam Wise for a web comic.
Okay, so we've been talking a bit about the eggs.
What about the chickens?
Are there actually, we said there's not many,
but are there some, and are there some that are actually production level
or are people mostly experimenting?
With some feed readers, I mean, like there's my experimental one
and I don't know of any other.
Like are there any pod catchers that do this?
I expect not.
I don't believe so.
Although I've had the most, the best responses to the notion of full-hit feeds
from people who do podcasts,
there seems to be an issue that a lot of them really care about
and just nobody was aware that there was a solution.
Yeah, because that's when you easily get into this.
You have a very long archive, you have people on mobile,
just like we talked about in the beginning.
So it seems to me like the obvious use case for this.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, podcasts and web comics in general,
I mean, I'm still looking forward to comic rocket actually using the
2005 feed because my comics are still broken on comic rocket,
by the way.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah, that name.
Honestly, what I'm trying to do is bucket.
But I would really like there to be a lot of competition for a lot of different readers,
a lot of different readers.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
I mean, comic rocket.
I use its archive feed mechanism a lot,
which I mean, I was using Metzikata's original archive before that.
But I mean, I was really glad when you took that over from Metzikata.
But yeah, it's just that's a handy thing.
And actually, that's gets back to another useful use of 5,000 five,
where you subscribe to a web comic.
You don't want to like read everything all in one sitting,
and you don't want to keep your browser tab open for a month or whatever.
But you just want to have your reader able to replay the content at a reasonable pace.
So doing your own archive feed.
We're assuming that also you have no self-control,
which is certainly true of me.
Yes.
So the idea of archive binge is that you tell it,
I want, say, five pages at a time.
And I want to see the next five pages every weekday,
until I've caught up with what's currently, currently being published.
And then it just gives you a custom feed that's only so many pages at a time.
And if you have something like a full history feed available,
you can construct this kind of user experience from that.
But the original archive binge that I took over from David Morgan-Mar,
supported like 30 web comics because that was all the people
that he'd made personal arrangements with to get their archives.
So that was a special arrangement that he didn't follow the specifications.
It was a special arrangement.
Yeah.
Yeah, like he had like a very ad hoc feed set up a thing with him.
And he just he wanted a special URL that he could ping to see like what most recent update is.
And it was it was almost like if you remember the RS has three April Fools joke spec.
Or I assume it isn't April Fools.
It's hard to tell sometimes, but where it was basically just a simple text document
rather than a full XML document.
I never heard of this.
I don't remember that.
But since interesting.
RS has three.
Yes.
It's basically RSX except in the amul instead of being XML.
I see.
I think it was a snarky joke that someone did during the whole RSS versus Adam.
Yeah.
Schism, although.
Or RS is two.
Yeah.
Well, RS has two.
And then Adam.
That was a really complex history that I don't remember the details of.
But it was just it was a mess.
And fortunately, every reader just supports with RS and Adam now.
So it became moot.
All right.
So.
I've learned a lot in the last almost hour now.
I didn't know there was so much about this one or two page.
That was the other day.
This has been really cool.
Thank you.
So I'm clacky.
We can you can find me on the free social web clacky at libranet.de.
And what about you?
So I'm fluffy.
You can see all my stuff at bees buzz dot biz, which is somehow easier to say out loud than to spell.
I'm not sure why.
But also a queer dot party slash fluffy is my master on presence.
And I'm Jamie.
I spelled my name weird.
So it might be easier to find my website is minilop.net, which just shows how much web comics have been a part of my life.
Because that's a reference to bun bun the mini-lop from sluggy freelance.
I was wondering about that.
It's a comic I haven't read for years, but you know, when I needed a domain name in 2003.
So minilop.net is you'll find my blog there.
I'm also on master done at jamey at toot.cat.
And I would love to chat chat with people about any questions about how to implement rfc5005.
I have a lot of a lot of opinions about this.
A lot of thought into it.
I've done an implementation of a WordPress plugin that you could use if you want to publish rfc5005 feeds on your WordPress blog.
So yes, please talk to me.
Please implement this.
Please add this to your favorite thing.
Please go find the issue tracker for your favorite tools and ask them to do it.
Let's make this happen.
And if you like interviews with jamey, actually you've been on hpr before.
Nine years ago, yeah.
Talking about your x4 work.
Yeah.
That is episode 825 if you would like to hear that.
That's been a while.
Are you still doing xorg stuff now?
Not much.
I had to keep kind of an eye on it.
I haven't actually contributed any patches for quite a while now.
Okay, but I was trying to round this off.
So myself there from following anything up.
Until next time, this has been hacker public radio.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks.
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