Need To Know When Your Favorite Webcomic Updates?

Comic Alert! is a website that has set up RSS feeds for over 6,000 comics published online. It allows anyone to sign up for a free account and create a customized RSS feed for their favorite webcomics. While they may eventually get some grief from newspaper comic strip syndicates, they have done the right thing by not pulling comic images directly for the feed. Instead, a link to the website publishing the comic is provided.

As the operators of the site explain in their FAQ:

Q: Doesn’t this hurt the artists / publishers?
A: Not at all! Our goal is to promote comic artists and their work, not harm it. To that end we will not link directly to images in the RSS feeds (doing this bypasses the ad revenue, and that DOES hurt the artists). Plus, we have several features that are aimed at bringing new readers to existing comics. Think of us as free promotion.

Q: Can you include the most recent strip directly in the news item?
A: Short answer, no (see above question for some details). If, on the other hand, we received permission from the copyright owner (the artist/publisher) to include the strips themselves, we’d be more than happy to. We don’t expect this to happen anytime soon though.

Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.

3 Comments

  1. Too bad there are no Modern Tales comics in the list (note to the guys doing this: feel free to scrape our pages to create RSS feeds that don’t include image files, or else make use of our own rss feeds).

    Of course, anybody could just drop this code into their own homepage or links page:

    <iframe src=”http://www.moderntales.com/headline_feed.php?iframe=yes” height=”500″ width=”250″>

    Joey
    http://www.moderntales.com

  2. <iframe src=”http://www.moderntales.com/headline_feed.php?iframe=yes&affiliateID=xxx” height=”500″ width=”250″></iframe>

    … would be the actual code. Sorry.

    Joey
    http://www.moderntales.com

  3. I just came to realize that efforts like these are a little useless. This list seems to be keeping track of webcomics that already update on a regular basis. I honestly don’t Need To Know When my Favorite Webcomic Updates.

    This only works for comics with a sporadic schedule.

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