Right now I read something on the order of 36 webcomics. Some of them update daily, some weekly, some once every other day… it gets erratic. So over a year ago, I had a bright idea: collect all the images into one html file so that they all load at once while I read the first few, to cut down on the time it took to load all the pages. The way I did this was fairly simple: I wrote and compiled a small program in QBasic, which when executed reads a template file and plugs in the current date in whatever format that particular comic prefers. I then told my computer to run this qbasic program daily, and set the result to be my home page. And I was happy, because even on a cable modem, this cut down the time required to read everything from 45 minutes to closer to 10.
It looked like this:
When I got to college, one of the first things I did was format my hard drive and reinstall the OS in an attempt to make the network work. It didn’t fix the problem, but it did get rid of the convenient webcomics directory. I discovered around January that I had managed to preserve some backup files, but by that time I had learned to read all the webcomics in under 15 minutes reliably. Being on a T1 line helped a lot towards that end.
I didn’t rewrite the webcomics directory for several reasons. The biggest was sheer laziness: it wasn’t strictly necessary anymore, as the network here loads the average webcomic homepage in approximately 0 seconds. But more than that, it didn’t look nice. It was very basic HTML, and it had many, many red Xs where the comic didn’t update for that day, or had a different name than usual, or basically any other anomaly. It was very fragile code, and I’m not terribly proud of it. I’ve had it in the back of my mind for quite a while that I would rewrite it when I discovered a way to eliminate those problems.
Now, summer is approaching, and I’m feeling the need to rewrite it in anticipation of a much slower internet connection. What’s really making this possible, though, is the fact that Tau Ceti had much the same idea as I did, but he’s implemented it in a way that I haven’t used before: php. What’s more, he’s letting me see the source, so I can figure out how to turn his idea (which is similar to what I had in mind, but not really what I want) into mine. It seems I won’t be able to keep the page on my local machine if I do this though, which is where the issue comes up.
If I post this directory to a php-enabled server, which is easy enough, all of a sudden anyone in the world can view it. I know that many of the artists that I like depend on ad-banner revenue for a significant portion of their income; at the same time I know that losing the fraction of a cent that I contribute may penalize them perhaps 2 cents over the course of a year. I’m pretty sure they can accept that loss.
What I don’t want is for other people to start using my directory for their own purposes, because this is where the artist starts getting penalized. An unnoticeable loss suddenly becomes significant if you multiply it by 10, 100, 1000…
I’ll do what I can to prevent this. By not linking to it from any of my own webpages, I restrict the address to those I tell. What’s more, so long as none of them links to it, it’s securely hidden from browser crawls…
I know it’s not ethically perfect. But it’ll have to do.
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