Dilbert Feed

Over 200,000 people have subscribed to the unofficial Dilbert feed I provided via Tapestry for the last 5 years or so. However, the official site now supplies an RSS feed (and the strip in colour!), so I’m retiring the unofficial feed.

It’s always been my policy to do this whenever official feeds appear, so please redirect your feed readers to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip instead.

And thanks for all your support over the years!

Tapestry Online Again

Sorry for the delay in getting things back up and running. I’ve moved all the unofficial feeds such as Dilbert and Get Fuzzy to be hosted at Tapestry runs on.

Well behaved news readers should update automagically, but it amazes me to see lots of requests still coming through the redirect in operation at dwlt.net! I guess not all news readers (particularly home grown ones, of which there seem to be a lot) are well behaved. ;-)

Tapestry Currently Off The Air

Just a quick note to let everyone know that Tapestry is off-line right now. Seems as though the server was completely swamped earlier, so it was taken off to alleviate the pressure on the box. More soon.

Tapestry 200

Congratulations to Wulffmorgenthaler, which just became the 200th comic listed at Tapestry!

Tapestry Viaduct

Martin pointed out that Lifehacker pointed to an article which mentioned Tapestry (Lifehacker itself found the link to the end article from another blog, hence the “viaduct” name for this post).

Always good to see the old site get some publicity.

Tags: comics, tapestry, tapestrycomics, webcomics

Server Update

Grr. As you may have noticed, the server box that runs Tapestry is somewhat b0rked. I’m in the midst of moving it and getting it all sorted out, so I hope it will all be back by Sunday evening at the latest.

Tapestry Service Announcement

I've got some ideas for new features I'd like to include in Tapestry, which I'll work on at some unspecified date in the future. I might even make it look pretty, you never know.

You might like to know that the Dilbert feed has around 116,000 subscribers, about 3x what it was when I started counting using FeedBurner a couple of months back. All those readers means my bandwidth bill is creeping, so I've set up a tip jar on the site. There is of course no obligation, but I appreciate any and all contributions.

Technorati Tags: webcomics, comics, tapestry, tapestrycomics

Tapestry Server Down

The Tapestry server is down, for reasons unknown and that I don’t have time to investigate at the moment (due to having critical real life work to be getting on with). I will probably get on to this on Thursday or Friday, and provide an update then.

This will only affect feeds for comics which don’t have their own official feeds, which sadly includes Dilbert, Peanuts, Get Fuzzy (ironically, the server is called Satchel), PvP and Liberty Meadows.

Your normal comic reading service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Update: it appears to have come back online of its own volition! Carry on :-D

Quick Comics Update

So judging from the comments, it seems that people are a bit upset by the Over the Hedge feed removal, basically backing up what I said about letting the comic go to the people, rather than go to the comic and force feed them adverts. No response yet from Mr. Fry, or from United Media, by the way.

If Mr. Fry had simply asked me to adjust the feed so that it was basically a link through to the site, I would have done that. Readers would still have been upset, but I think they would have coped with the changes, especially since this is exactly how most other official comic feeds work. But he didn’t, and people haven’t taken too kindly to it, or the wording of it.

In other webcomic news, some folks who had their comics at Keenspot have launched Blank Label Comics:

Blank Label Comics proudly announces a new approach to self-publishing for cartoonists. Blank Label is a cooperative group of cartoonists who are helping one another succeed as independents.

These six cartoonists, previously hosted at Keenspot, are banding together for cross-promotion and advertising. Each is using his proficiency in a particular aspect of the cartooning business to help the others — who are doing the same in return.

Which is great, and I wish them luck, but what’s this? No feeds? :-|

As Matt said in #mobitopia earlier:

You keep swinging the cluestick, but you’re not hitting anyone.

I figure I should get a clue-by-four instead of a clue-by-clue; easier to wield.

Taken Longer Than I Thought...

But I’ve been expecting you too :-) Here’s a comment I received on the blog a few hours ago, from Michael Fry, the co-author of Over the Hedge (which unsurprisingly, has an RSS feed via Tapestry):

As flattered as I am that you’ve included Over the Hedge in your Tapestry RSS feeds, I would like you to cease and desist distributing the strip immediately. As far as I can tell you’re stripping the strip off of United’s website without the advertising that supports it being available in the first place. You are stealing. You are taking money out of my pocket just as surely as if you held a gun to my head and demanded my wallet. By making Hedge so easily and freely available you are undermining the economics that make the comics you so obviously love possible. I don’t work for free and neither do you. Stop denying my right to make a living.

I’m going to forward this note to United Media and ask that they follow up with a cease and desist letter of their own.

Sincerely,

Michael Fry

And here’s my response:

Michael,

Thanks for getting in touch.

I’m very sorry to hear that you don’t like the “easily and freely available” version of your comic; surely this would help increase your audience? I know that this is the approach that Scott Kurtz (who writes PvP) takes—more people reading the strip means more people likely to buy merchandise and treasuries. In fact, I can vouch for this in my own reaction to Get Fuzzy (I actually don’t read Over the Hedge myself, but it looks as though Hedge is a well requested feed).

I have suspended the Hedge feed as of now, but I suspect that all the readers will do is either find other feeds which are lower profile than Tapestry, until you and United Media offer feeds directly. This is now how an increasing number of people want to consume your work, and the onus is now on you and your peers to find a business model that works. Here’s an ebook which comes highly recommended which might give you some further ideas: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/.

Finally, I would like to say that I take offense at the violent imagery used in your email. I can only presume that you are sending similarly worded emails to Google, the Mozilla Foundation, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the many other companies who provide and enable various ad-blocker tools used by visitors to the United site.

I look forward to receiving United Media’s cease and desist letter.

Best Regards, David Thomson

I have now suspended the feed from Tapestry, so if you’re wondering why it’s not working, now you know.

The Comics Curmudgeon

Doesn’t quite fit into the Tapestry directory, but you should make a point of adding The Comics Curmudgeon to your blogroll. Josh Fruhlinger reads the syndicated comic strips every day, then writes about them. He even manages to make many of them funny. You have to respect that.

Tapestry Regeneration

Things have been a bit quiet on the Tapestry front recently, but I’ve been pleased to see that a wide number of webcomics have started adding official feeds. As a result, I figured I’d revamp Tapestry to be more of a directory of webcomics which have feeds available.

A number of the feeds are still hosted on the brand new Tapestry Comics site (such as those for Dilbert, Get Fuzzy et al). For those independent comics (such as PvP), I’ve added links to the community and store so that you can support those comics directly (and please do support all the webcomics that you read).

I actually think that the feed information should now form part of a larger directory such as OnlineComics.net, but until they do, you can find everything you need here.

A new feature which I’ve added is the ability to add new comics with feeds as you come across them, or you can add comics which don’t have feeds to make a request for a feed to be added. I’ve added redirects for all the feeds at the old site, so you may notice that everything refreshes initially, but it will all settle down in due course.

From a technological point of view, the site is built on the ever-so-clever Ruby on Rails, and I ported all the scrapers from Python to Ruby as well. I heart Ruby. The bonus for you, dear feed subscriber, is that the locally scraped feeds are now actually in something approaching the RSS format, rather than in the weird twisted ‘dwlt’ variant :-)

Anyway, have fun everyone! Let me know if you’re having any problems.

A Post About Comics

An email from Ron pointed out that a couple of comics that never used to have RSS feeds now do! Hooray for MegaTokyo (feed) and UserFriendly (feed). This makes some of the stuff I’ve been doing on TNG seem worthwhile…

Meanwhile, over at Comixpedia, there’s an interesting article about comics and micropayments, which falls in the middle of an equally interesting series of articles about the history of webcomics. (Via)

Utoons

Dan Youra emailed me to let me know about his Utoons, which of course have an RSS feed (subscribed!). I figure that the type of people who like the Tapestry feeds will like Dan’s comics as well.

Nice work, Dan!

User Friendly

Tapestry has had a feed for User Friendly for a while, although I’m not sure how many people have actually been able to read it (UF do some IP blocking to stop bandwidth theft).

With this in mind, I’ve been in touch with the User Friendly team, and have agreed to take the RSS feed offline for now. However, we’re actively discussing an official feed, so keep an eye out either here or on the UF site itself.

Dilbert Feed Makes Top 100

Share Your OPML: Top 100 Feeds, of course, has a feed for the list.

[via Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]

UComics Update

I heard back from the legal team at UComics, and it doesn’t seem like they’re going to kill me, which is nice. My plea to have them offer official feeds has been passed on to the technical team, but I don’t expect to hear anything else until after the holidays.

And if anyone is so inclined, you can set up your own local feeds by using something like this. Please don’t ask me for the code: it’s nothing personal, I’m just trying to cover myself. I’m sure you understand.

Happy Christmas!

: Or Holiday of your choice/belief.

Thanks Everyone

I’d like to thank everyone who has emailed, commented or otherwise written with their support regarding the current UPS/Tapestry situation. It’s much appreciated, and rest assured that I will post back here again once things progress.

I've Been Expecting You...

So you may have noticed that Tapestry and some of the feeds have been acting a bit funny over the last couple of days? (Thanks to the good folks over at Lockergnome’s RSS Resource for putting an alert out).

This morning, I received a letter from Eleanor DaCosta, a Legal Administrator at Andrews McMeel Universal, the parent company of Universal Press Syndicate and ucomics, demanding that I immediately remove any and all material bearing characters from, or the name of, any of the Features, as well as any links to any such material or names or to our ucomics website (so I guess this posting may technically be in breach of the letter).

The usual cease and desist letter then, for the comics which Tapestry provide feeds for, including Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield and FoxTrot. I’m not about to put myself at risk, so I’ve taken the infringing feeds away. I’ll be talking with Ms DaCosta about the way forward, and will report back soon.

You are using the Features at your website, http://dwlt.net/tapestry/, wholly without AMU’s authorization, as well as framing the Features with your own advertising, again without authorization whatsoever from AMU.

Two things that stand out: one, I’m not really using the features, although I agree that this is something of a grey area. The second bit though, about advertising, is a bit unfounded. Yes, I ask people to maybe send me a book, if they like, but I wouldn’t classify that as advertising.

Anyway, I’m not going to dwell on it, and I’ll be offering the code for the feeds to ucomics to try and make things official. Let’s see what happens.

Day By Day Comic Feed

I received a request from Nick Queen to add a feed to Tapestry for Day By Day by Chris Muir, but it seems he already added one: Day By Day RSS Feed.

Crack Comics

Scott Kurtz at PvPonline points to this story about the similarities of comics and cocaine.

MetaFilter on Tapestry

Matt Haughey mentions Tapestry over at MetaFilter: The business model of the funny pages.

In the ensuing discussion, insomnia_lj complains about everyone making a big deal about Tapestry recently, and talks about the feeds that were/are available at LiveJournal since March 2001.

One of the reasons for me starting the feeds here was that the Dilbert feed that I found at LiveJournal just didn’t work for me or for Martin.

insomnia_lj also talks about the fact that independent creators should take control of their feeds rather than have them scraped. As I’ve said before here, here and here, I would love the creators to offer the feeds directly, or have me host the feeds for them, so that they can either charge a subscription fee or include adverts in the feeds in some way.

I’m going to focus on the grander plans for Tapestry that I’ve mentioned before in the next few weeks, and as such I probably won’t be adding any new feeds for the time being.

New Comics Alert!

Alright, after much procrastination, I finally decided to spend a few minutes on Tapestry this evening. So now (fanfare), you can read User Friendly via RSS! I think that one will be popular ;-)

I’ve also added Tom Toles and Pat Oliphant.

Click on over to the Tapestry page to get the feeds for these and other comics.

Finally, I recently had a request for Rubes, but Ucomics.com have locked off the archive for that, so I can’t provide a feed unfortunately.

Companies Reading Tapestry Feeds

Given it’s the first day of the month, I thought I’d check out my usage stats. Over the last four months, data transferred has doubled month over month and unique sites visiting has risen from 495 in June when I first started Tapestry with the Dilbert feed to 45,655 in November.

I admit to being slightly taken aback by those numbers; I figured that the feeds would be used largely by friends and friends of friends. But then again, I suppose that’s how it all starts, right?

Anyway, I noticed that there were a few companies accessing the feeds:

• Macromedia: Hi! If someone there sees this, I’d be really interested in talking with somebody from your mobile Flash team (techwise and business end);
• BioWare: Creators of the greatest computer RPGs ever. Especially hello to Greg and Ray (co-CEOs), who I’ve met at the last 5 or so E3s;
• MAYA Design: A design consultancy, who look to have a series of very interesting usability papers. I’ll need to read these later on.

iComic Story

Via Comixpedia, an interesting piece about iComic.

Of specific interest to myself, however, are the comments around the review. This is why I urge everyone to support the comic creators if you use the Tapestry feeds; they’re the creative guys and gals, I’m just creating some glue until they start providing RSS feeds themselves.

I still don’t feel that I’m actually stealing the content, merely providing another conduit, but I would love to work directly with the comic guys out there to create ‘official’ feeds and look at how this can help them build their fanbases.

If anyone is interested in this, please get in touch.

Ideas for Tapestry

I’m heading off to visit with Hewligan and his lovely Wife tomorrow, so will be MIA until Monday. Before I go, though, here are a few ideas I have planned for Tapestry in the future. I’d appreciate if anyone has any feedback on these or other ideas that they might want to see:

• Automated request list, with public voting;
• Reduction in the number of entries in each feed to 7 strips (to save on bandwidth);
• Mechanisms for promoting other webcomics (on the site and within feeds);
• Start to include feeds offered by comics themselves;
• Feed development for comic creators

I’m not putting a timetable on any of these features or tools, because I don’t have a huge amount of time to devote to this at the moment. Hopefully around Christmas/New Year I might get some of it done, however.

Supporting Web Comics

In an email conversation with Annie Taylor Lebel of Full Tilt today, I wondered if there might be scope for something along the lines of BlogAds, but specifically to support comics which provide RSS feeds.

Rather than force people to go back to the site to view sponsors or ads there, why not add an extra half-frame at the right-side of the standard comic image size (this could be done automagically). A specialist ad service could work to help advertisers understand the audience for a given comic (although there are a lot of them out there!) to match ads with the right comics.

Just a thought…

Tapestry Updates

A few simple changes over at Tapestry: a couple of new aggregators on the list, a new RSS feed which you can use instead of the OPML file, and links to both the RSS and OPML files.

More coming soon. Maybe.

Button

I just uploaded the Tapestry button to Steal These Buttons. Hopefully, it will help spread the word on Tapestry a little bit further.

Oh My...

Now this is a fantastic idea: daily comic-strips syndicated as RSS feeds—who needs a separate “comics reader” when an RSS aggregator can suck in anything that can be represented as a syndicated feed?

That’s exactly why I made the feeds in the first place—I heard about iComic for Mac (no use to me on Windows XP), but that was at the same time I was getting into blogging and RSS feeds and so on. Why would you want a separate application which does essentially the same thing as an aggregator? The rest is, as they say, history (still in the making).

As of this morning, Bloglines is my top external referrer, with 8383 this month. It will be very interesting to see how (if?) things have changed when I wake up tomorrow morning…

Martin is pleased for me.

I think it’s pretty cool, too :-)

Comixpedia on RSS Comic Feeds

Xaviar Xerexes has posted an article over at Comixpedia about using RSS feeds with web comics, which explains about RSS and why it is useful in terms of comics.

There’s a sidebar about Tapestry as well, discussing the copyright issues which I’ve discussed here before.

It looks like diesel sweeties now has its own feed, so that’s one I can knock off my own to-do list :-). In fact, if all the WebComics of the world start providing RSS feeds, Tapestry’s job would be complete, and I’d be happy fellow indeed.

But perhaps it could then serve a different purpose, such as providing an aggregate feed of all your favourite comics (this would be called Weave, for obvious reasons), and a giant directory of all available feeds. Thoughts, anyone?

Tapestry has net effect?

Annie Taylor Lebel wrote to let me know that Full Tilt Features have freely available RSS feeds for all their comics (hers included). Fantastic news, I think you’ll agree!

Also, via Lockergnome’s RSS Resource, I noticed that Unshelved has its own feed too.

In specific Tapestry news, I’ll be adding a section to the page to show which comics are next in line to have feeds added. And if you are responsible for any of the comics that are available, I’m more than happy to work with you to transfer the feed from this site to yours.

And no, I won’t apologise for the pun in the title for this post.

Google Search for Dilbert

Click here, Google Search: dilbert and you should see that Tapestry is the sixth result. Pretty cool!

More Tapestry mentions

JD Lasica: Comic strips via RSS

J-Walk Blog: Comic Strips VIA RSS

Some Fresh Tapestry Lovin'...

From Swanky Conservative, The Dead Parrot Society, and Electric Venom.

Thanks to one and all! I do appreciate a nice egorub…

Problem Feeds

There are some issues with some feeds this morning, I’m looking into it.

Update: Everything seems to be ok now. Looks like it was a problem from the scraping at www.ucomics.com. I updated Calvin & Hobbes a bit to resolve some duplicate item entries in some news readers as well.

Feed Fix + New Comics

I fixed a few bugs in some of the Tapestry feeds, and also added B.C. and Wizard of Id. Enjoy!

Fifth Wave Comic

The 5th Wave: Comic for 24 Aug 2003

:-)

Nice Weather Puts Paid to Plans

Since the weather has been so nice recently, I’ve not devoted time to adding new comics to Tapestry. Sorry, but I do have a life outside of this (unbelievable as that may sound)! I will probably be adding User Friendly next, so stay tuned…

Also, if you’re asking for a comic which doesn’t have a huge readership, I would appreciate it if you sent me a book from my wishlist once the feed becomes available. The popularity of this service has really boomed this month, so if I end up paying for extra bandwidth, then the least popular feeds will go first. That might sound cruel, but my book habit comes first ;-)

Auto-discovery of an OPML index

You (especially if your name is Chris Pirillo ;-) ) will be delighted to learn that there is now an OPML file containing details of all the feeds offered by Tapestry available here. This can be used by the RSS readers to alert you to new feeds, and allows for a more user-friendly subscription mechanism.

I’ve also been looking at adding some form of <link …> tag in order to help the reader programs auto-discover the listing (I struggled with this before). So I had a dig about, and came up with this posting from Adam Kalsey. It seems that Radio Userland uses this kind of thing for published subscriptions:

<link rel=”subscriptions” type=”text/x-opml” title=”Subscriptions” href=”http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/gems/mySubscriptions.opml”>

However, I’m not entirely happy with describing this as ‘Subscriptions’, though. So I had a look at a reference for the link tag, and I found what I think suits my purposes best: index. So the Tapestry page now contains the following link tag:

<link rel=”index” type=”text/x-opml” title=”Index” href=”http://dwlt.net/tapestry/tapestry.opml” />

What do people think of this? Am I using this correctly? It seems to make the most sense in the context of Tapestry, and I imagine that there will be future requirements where people are offering multiple feeds from one place, so coming up with a standard for this is a Good Thing™. However, I’m happy to go with a consensus, so if the gurus and newsreader authors want to comment, let’s get something working.

Ethics of Comics Feeds

Chad has written a piece on how legal Tapestry is (or not). This is something I did think about up front, which is why I ask people who use the feeds to support the creators of the comics; I’m not doing this to make a profit, I only ask that people send me a book or two to help cover the cost of maintaining the feeds. Anyway, here’s my view:

Ucomics.com:

Displaying, storing, copying, or otherwise making available any content from the Site on another website without the prior written permission of uclick is expressly prohibited.

I actually think this is the easy one: I’m not storing the strips anywhere, and I’m not displaying them on my website. I provide links back to the source website for all strips. You could argue that the RSS feed is just a webpage that links through to the most recent set of comic strips.

Without limiting other restrictions, you agree not to reproduce, transmit, sell, or otherwise exploit the Site and/or Applications for any commercial purpose.

Yes, you could argue that I’m transmitting portions of the site. However, it is not for any commercial purpose.

Comics.com:

For purposes of this Agreement, the use of any UM Materials on any other web site or networked computer environment is prohibited.

Again, I’m not actually using the materials, merely providing an application which allows access.

Here’s a question though: is something this covered by America’s so-called Fair Use section of Copyright law?

All being said and done, I’m not a lawyer, nor is Chad, and if UM or UFS or anyone asks me to stop…, well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it ;-)

New Comics

Further to requests from Chad Everett and Deb Fleming, some new comics are available at Tapestry: Big Nate, Drabble, Mixed Media, Pearls Before Swine, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

Deb and Chris Pirillo have also requested some independent comics, so I’ll get those going in the next few days…

First Book

Many thanks to Chad Everett, who is the first to send me a book in support of the Tapestry feeds. He bought me Code by Charles Petzold. Thanks again!

Update: I’ve also added The Duplex, The Fifth Wave, and Gil Thorp at Chad’s request. I’ll be adding an RSS feed to show the latest supported comics over the next couple of days now that Tapestry actually has a database behind it…

Awasu Mention Tapestry

News aggregator Awasu mentioned Tapestry on their blog. Cool!

PS I don’t have a PayPal button, but books from my wishlist are read with gratitude ;-)

Tapestry Top Five

Here are the top 5 most requested feeds from Tapestry in July:

1. Dilbert
2. Calvin and Hobbes
3. Garfield
4. Peanuts
5. Get Fuzzy

So now you know.

Tapestry Update

New comic feeds, by request: Adam@Home, Over The Hedge, For Better or For Worse, and Zits. I also added Liberty Meadows, just for fun. If you haven’t used Tapestry yet, check it out!

Oh—and another satisfied user: Ian’s Messy Desk

Tapestry Praise

Comics lesen per RSS PlasticThinking: Moe’s Blog. (Translation via Google)

Thanks Moe! Glad to be of service :-D

Tapestry : Foxtrot and Non Sequitur

On request from Chris Pirillo, Foxtrot and Non Sequitur have been added to the Tapestry RSS comic feed service. If you haven’t already checked out Tapestry, click that link!

A Micropayment Comic

On a comic related note, Scott McCloud in conjunction with a company called BitPass, has launched a web comic which costs $0.25 to view. It’s all a very painless process to get signed up and gain access, so good luck to him!

As regular readers (do I have any?) will know, I’ve talked a bit about making money from web content, specifically comics. Having read Scott’s books Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, he is obviously very passionate about creating a system that allows creators to benefit from the openness that the web brings. In his words, creators shouldn’t be punished (in bandwidth terms) for being popular; they should be able to generate enough money to cover those costs. Scott Kurtz, over at PvPonline, on the other hand, doesn’t think micropayments are the way to go. From his viewpoint, he will make money to cover his costs via merchandise, advertising, and print comics.

That’s fair enough—I think that different comics will suit different business models. Scott M’s experiment is made up of three chapters, so a one-off payment to access each one seems the right model (in fact, given the fact that I have to sign up first, is $0.25 too low?). PvP, on the other hand, which is daily, is more suited to the “spin-off” model Scott K uses, or potentially, a subscription basis ($2.00 a month; $20 for the year in advance?). The subscription, would of course, be delivered by RSS, or possibly Pie/Echo/Whatever. There, I said it again :-)

Request for Comic RSS Feeds

Chris Pirillo writes about why comic authors don’t provide RSS feeds, while his first commentator asks why they don’t charge for the feeds to ween themselves off sponsorship and advertising.

As I’ve said before, I would absolutely love for that situation to be the norm, but there’s still some work to be done on the newsreaders that are out there, and on the artists themselves.

I’ve tried getting in touch with a couple, but I’ve not had any response. Too bad, as I think this would be a winner. You’d still need to block people from parsing the archive pages as I do in Tapestry, but I’m sure that can be done.

A soul in need...

Whilst adding some Tapestry feeds to Feedster, I came across this plea for help by Jeff Szymona: Comics Over RSS?

I guess that a Mutts feed will be launching soon…

New Comic Feeds

Another day, another set of comic feeds for your RSS aggregator:

• Garfield
• Get Fuzzy
• Doonesbury
• Peanuts
• TrueNuff
• Penny Arcade

Click here to find out more.

Calvin and Hobbes

Tapestry now provides a Calvin and Hobbes feed, for your reading pleasure!

Tapestry Launch

I’m pleased to announce here that my web comic RSS feeds are now online! Check it out by clicking here. Enjoy :-D