RSS under construction…
Posted August 12th, 2008 by Howard TaylerHey, who wants a Schlock Mercenary RSS feed?
(I sure do!)
Programmer and Schlocker extraordinaire Mark Shieh has cobbled something together for all of us at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS. This feed won’t give you anything except the comic (no footnotes, for instance), but Mark is working on that.
Try it out! Let’s see if we can BREAK it. Programmers LOVE that.
Explore posts in the same categories: Site News, Internet
August 12th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
This marks the first time I’ve read the announcement of an rss feed from within another rss feed. Surreal.
I’m happy to report I’m the second subscriber in google reader. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, so thank you.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
This marks the first time I’ve read the announcement of an rss feed from within another rss feed. Surreal.
HILARIOUS.
Oh, and you’re welcome. But thank Mark — he’s doing all the hard work.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I twitched a little on that last line.
August 12th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
We’ve already established that I can make people laugh. Making them twitch is an extension of that superpower.
August 12th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
SchlockRSS worked for me, I added it to My Yahoo! I’m so happy, I finally registered at Blógünder Schlock so I can tell you how happy I am! =D
August 12th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Yeah, I twitched on that last line too. Thanks for schlock, and thanks for the shout out!
Mark (Shieh)
August 12th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
In a bizarre twist, this showed up as I started my browser to try to fix some broken web design of my own. That last comment made me laugh, cringe, and cheer all at the same time.
August 12th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Well, I tried using LiveBookmark [from firefox] and it continuously failed to load :-(
Loving the idea though! Any ideas anyone?
August 12th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Yay! Now I can retire my scrappy screen-scraping script (it had no images just links, I’d feel guilty if I didn’t visit the page itself).
I can’t wait for the day when every comic I read adds an RSS feed, it’s such a more organized way to get notified of new stuff :)
August 12th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Yep, we loooove that. Wait, what? You are dis-invited from my workplace!
August 12th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I’m in — I love my RSS reader. Now it won’t matter if I miss a day (although I can’t remember the last time THAT happened).
Although — now I don’t get the ads. You might want to think about the economics of this, Howard. Perhaps it should be by subscription? I don’t want to discourage this, cause I _love_ RSS, but I just want you to stay gainfully employed drawing and plotting Schlock. Also, you’re one of the few web cartoons that doesn’t need an RSS feed — I just visit every day, no questions asked. (Webcomics that update irregularly are the ones that need RSS.)
August 12th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Thanks for the feed. Always looking for ways to better your already great customer service. :)
wtanksleyjr–don’t worry about the economics. Confession–I already built myself a feed for Schlock Mercenary (as well as a few other sites that don’t offer RSS) and it’s never stopped me from coming to the site itself. Browsing the archives, reading the footnotes, glancing through the forums–not to mention jumping onto the site at 9 PM (MDT) to catch the comic because I’m too impatient to wait for my RSS feed to get to it.
And that’s what I’ve heard from other sites as well, Perhaps counter-intuitively, RSS feeds do little to decrease ad revenue.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
The original feed actually had no comic because of the advertising concern, but if PvP and Schlock both think that it doesn’t impact them too much, then I guess they know better than us.
Also, there’s the possibility of using the RSS as an advertising stream down the road.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You know, I generally refuse to read any comic that doesn’t have an RSS feed. Schlock is the one exception. It hasn’t impacted me at all because you’re so amazingly reliable with your daily updates. Reading Schlock at 9 has become a part of the daily routine.
I’ll subscribe to the feed in any case, and see if it helps. :)
August 12th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
@Knight: The URL I posted won’t work for Live Bookmarks. You need to hit this one:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS?format=xml
August 12th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Bloglines:
feed works as expected. added the feed using the feed url; did not try asking bloglines to auto-find the feed based on the shlockmercenary.com site address
Safari:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS - the rightmost pixels of each comic are cut off (looks like about 5-10px, not sure). also, sometimes when you load it automatically switches to the built-in rss reader (see below), sometimes it doesn’t. Fairly certain that’s a browser issue not anything with your code, but who knows.
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS (using safari’s built-in rss reader, ignores the feed’s styles/stylesheets) - works as expected
Firefox 2.0 for mac:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS always opens with the built-in rss reader (and ignores attached styles) This seems to be the default behavior for the browser though, so: works as expected
August 12th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I’ll wait until the feed includes footnotes. With such a regularly-updated comic, there’s not much point in a feed that only gives some of the content. And, like Terry Pratchett, Howard Tayler’s writing just isn’t the same without footnotes.
And I’m not twitching. On the project I’m working on, I need to break my program. I already know it’s woefully unscalable, and I need a sufficiently large input (i.e. one that breaks it) to benchmark various alternative algorithms against.
Ah, the joys of research.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
While I agree that comics that don’t update everyday need an RSS, I still love that you gave us this option. Cheers to Taylor and Mark!
August 13th, 2008 at 3:27 am
Hmm, I cannot make Fiorefox load the feed from the new URL either..
August 13th, 2008 at 4:17 am
Yeah, the new url isn’t working either…
August 13th, 2008 at 4:42 am
I also noticed the RSS display page cuts off the right edge of each strip, regardless of window size, in both FF and IE. In non-correct HTML terms: is the part where the “content” is displayed supposed to be fixed width?
August 13th, 2008 at 6:24 am
@Howard I think Firefox live bookmarks requires an actual XML file to read from. The posted link is a script passing in the variable “XML”.
Love the comic, good to see it still as entertaining as it was when I started reading it. (~4 years)
Long-time reader, first-time commenter :)
August 13th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Just noticed the cropping myself. WEIRD. I’ll poke Mark.
August 13th, 2008 at 6:50 am
I used the link you provided and it seamlessly inserted a list of links onto my yahoo home page. Clicking on one takes me to your page compleat with adds and blog.
Thanks!
Mel W.
August 13th, 2008 at 7:11 am
Wahoo! Schlock RSS!
August 13th, 2008 at 9:22 am
I really like the idea of an RSS feed, Howard, but AFAICS, there aren’t any ads in it. Which means you pay for the bandwidth without getting any ad revenue, and furthermore, you reduce the number of potentially-ad-revenue-generating visits to the site proper.
It’s funny. Any other site, I would have gone “w00t! no ads!”, but I want you to be able to do this for as long as you wish, as your main job. I’m sure you’ve thought about it, but indulge me and put my mind at ease, please.
For the time being, I will forego the RSS feed and continue generating page impressions.
Wow. I realized just how much I care about this comic. I need to get a life.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:51 am
adhominem: If I see ad revenue numbers plummet, I’ll pull the feed or make changes to it. Right now, though, ads only account for about 15% of my revenue. I’d much rather boost readership by a couple hundred percent and double my book sales.
If you really want to support me as a cartoonist don’t worry about the ads. Spread the comic far and wide to your friends, and then encourage them to buy book collections.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:59 am
@cutevixen: Thanks for the detailed updates.
@Rackham, Knight: Are you also using Firefox for the Mac?
@arcaneIRL: The feed link is really feedburner’s subscription page at first, not the xml of the feed. You may need to browse to the page before you can sign up. At least, I hope that’s what you’re seeing.
Sorry all, I won’t have a ton of time to look at this until tonight.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Ok, I am using WinXp home, sp2. Firefox is 3.01 for the pc.
Any other info I can give to help out, just let me know…
August 13th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Exactly same setup here too.
August 13th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Weird. I’m on XP Media Center, Firefox 3.01, and the feed works fine. What are the symptoms?
August 13th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
The loading of the Live bookmark fails. (pic is in Finnish).
If i try to reload, it just insta-fails again.
http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/6720/noschlocktf4.jpg
August 13th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Oh yay! Thank you! I love the new feed. I’ve been waiting for this for ages (pretty much as long as I’ve been reading the comic.) There’ve actually been long stretches when I’ve missed reading the comic just because I’ve had to check the page myself…my aggregators have made me lazy.
Now you just need to make sure announcements about new things to buy end up in the RSS feed.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Hi,
Thanks for the awesome works. Looks great.
I am _not_trying to be a backseat driver. I only know this because I had to figure it out for a client yesterday. In the event, that in the future you want to migrate to a different RSS feed, perhaps one on http://schlockmercenary.com you will find that your subscribers are hooked up to feedburner, and would need to re-enter a new feed.
In order to make such a future transition seamless you can use feedburner’s MyBrand service to present that feed at a schlockmercenary address. http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=79590&topic=13184
In short, you make a CNAME for a subdomain such as
rss.schlockmercenary.com IN CNAME http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS
Then anyone subscribing to http://rss.schlockmercenary.com gets the feedburner feed, but in the future you could swap out the feedburner feed with feed-of-your-choice. This way Howard ‘owns’ the subscribers, not google. The MyBrand service swaps its standard feedburner links with the url you tell it, so new users approaching from feedburner are presented with your domain name.
Good luck, and feel free to ping me if this is something you want but aren’t sure how to go about it. Thanks, again Michael!
August 13th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
And I relize I just called Mark, Michael. Sorry, mark! And thanks!
August 13th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I’m also having the issue with the cut-off right edge.
For reference:
Firefox 2.0.0.16
NoScript 1.7.8 (Site allowed)
August 13th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
OH! In my last post, I only put a complaint (BAD Ripsaw! BAD!)…I should have put before that how much I LOVE the strip…found it from a random link from another webcomic (Questionable Content, maybe?) and got instantly hooked. I’m consistently impressed by the quality of the story, and the obvious reluctance of the author to resort to “easy” gags to get a laugh.
Once I have a disposable income, the books are high on my list of things to get.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I updated the feed with some things Howard has been wanting to add, and what I hope will fix the cropping problem. (I still haven’t successfully reproduced it)
I think that some of the confusion is in the link itself. http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS is sometimes a web page that offers links to the feed, not the feed itself. Some feed readers can figure it out from there, and others (live bookmarks) expect to browse to that page and be given the link of http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS?format=xml .
Some testing results:
Safari OS X, http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS — I immediately get sent to feed://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS which works fine.
Firefox 3.0.1 Live Bookmarks, Vista 32-bit, http://feeds.feedburner.com/SchlockRSS?format=xml — Works for me.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:37 am
I don’t know what has changed, but the feed works for me in Live Bookmarks now. Yesterday I didn’t get anything visible in the XML after the text “Schlock Mercenary Feed” , now all content (pictures and links etc) loads properly. The content was in the XML code though.
Also, YAY for footnotes! The Buy Schlock Stuff-button under every comic is nice too. :D
August 14th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
ok, I know I’m late, but pretty much “ditto” to Rackham…
August 14th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Thanks for the continued updates. It looks like it I wasn’t quite producing valid xml, and some confusion on whether the link itself was the rss feed.