"But, Sean," you might ask, "if they've got an RSS feed, why are messing around with coding your own page? Why not just use an RSS reader?"
The 'problem' I run into with those are that the feeds sometimes do not include the comic itself. It will just have a link to the latest comic on the creator's website. And since my intent is to not have to pull up a bunch of different websites, what I find myself doing is reading the RSS feed for the updated information and then running some transformations on what is in the feed to be able to pull in the actual comic itself. (Basically, if they have a link to the updated comic page, I can use that to figure out what the link is directly to the comic image, and then just pull that in. If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, that's fine; just trust me in that it makes sense.)
Anyway, last week, I ran into an issue where suddenly a bunch of comics were no longer getting pulled into my page properly. I hadn't changed my code, so something clearly happened externally to change how many of the comics were being seen. I wasn't getting any useful information from the error messages, so I'm not exactly sure what happened. I was routing the RSS feeds through a third party proxy to avoid CORS header errors so I figure they changed something there. Weirdly, some feeds continue to run through that proxy with no problem, so it's not like it got shut down or something; but regardless, it means that I've had to rework much of my custom page.
My page has been built up over the past couple years so the code is unnecessarily bloated. Heck, there were parts of it that I copy/pasted from a similar effort I had done back in 2005, so it was very much a hodge podge of inefficient codes and hacks that I wouldn't put in any sort of production environment, but worked well enough for my single user situation. Some of the comics had problems on the first day of a new year (creators often put images into a directory labeled by the year they're uploaded, not necessarily the year they're going to be seen) and again on the first day of March (since February has a weird number of days) but I knew what the problems were and it wasn't worth it to correct them just for myself.
But knowing those various problems were in place and that I had to recode much of the page anyway, I figured it was a good time to essentially start over and take the opportunity to clean things up a bit. That's what I've been working on in my spare time over the past week or so. I've got the file size down from 120 KB to 90 KB. Probably not enough to make a noticeable impact, especially since I only ever view the file locally anyway.
Where I'm going with this is that I've had to put in some not insignificant effort here. It's not horrible, to be sure, but I'm certain I'd need to use this for probably decades to make up the time I'm 'saving' by not just going to each website individually. But what I'm able to do is handle this myself and I'm less reliant on how someone wants to code an RSS reader or some other aggregation platform; they're not going to suddenly close shop or decide to start charging for their service. I was talking back in December about owning your own media, and I see this as being similar to that. (If I really wanted to, I could add some functionality to my comics page that would save each day's installment as a discrete file that I could later call up from a local archive.) My point, though, is just that corporations are increasingly making everything a service that you need to pay ongoing fees for. But with a little effort, that's not necessary. I'm not saying everyone should build their own comics web page from scratch, but you do have much more control over your media than you might think.
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