4 ms·

One of the things I'm really concerned about personally is the archival of web comics. A number of comics that I've read over the years have already vanished fr

by Figs 10y ago

One of the things I'm really concerned about personally is the archival of web comics. A number of comics that I've read over the years have already vanished from the net like Ugly Hill, Simulated Comic Product, and Minus (once linked to by XKCD! Now it's gone...). archive.org, of course, has partial copies of some of these -- but it often seems to have trouble with comics and is usually missing years and years of content as a result.

msandford 10y ago
I've actually been working on-and-off for the last year or so to make a site which makes it easier to keep up with webcomics. As a part of crawling the sites to see if there are new comics, it's pretty easy to also archive them to be able to show partial thumbnails. Part of my motivation is similar to your worry that these things will disappear forever, despite having been a huge part of our culture. And I figure one of the best ways to get help on archiving comics is for people to complain "hey your site doesn't do comic X" and then I know that it exists and can get it into the system for crawling. I know saying "hey I'm working on it" isn't much better than "hey I thought about that too" but if you're interested I can attempt to let you know when I get far enough to put it up on the web instead of my workstation at home.
- markild 10y ago
  Have you seen this project[1]? It's a pretty customizable piece of software that has support for a lot of web comics out of the box. Obviously, re-hosting web comics is a murky, at best, territory, but this will easily allow local only access for your personal benefit. [1]: https://github.com/jodal/comics https://github.com/jodal/comics
  - msandford 10y ago
    No, I hadn't seen that yet. Thanks! I think rehosting is pretty bad, copyright infringement at best and not very nice to boot. That's why I decided that cropping and thumbnailing would be the way to go; enough of a picture to let someone say "yeah I saw that one already" but not so much that they don't go to the artist's site to see new comics.

by Figs 10y ago

msandford 10y ago

I've actually been working on-and-off for the last year or so to make a site which makes it easier to keep up with webcomics. As a part of crawling the sites to see if there are new comics, it's pretty easy to also archive them to be able to show partial thumbnails. Part of my motivation is similar to your worry that these things will disappear forever, despite having been a huge part of our culture. And I figure one of the best ways to get help on archiving comics is for people to complain "hey your site doesn't do comic X" and then I know that it exists and can get it into the system for crawling. I know saying "hey I'm working on it" isn't much better than "hey I thought about that too" but if you're interested I can attempt to let you know when I get far enough to put it up on the web instead of my workstation at home.

markild 10y ago
Have you seen this project[1]? It's a pretty customizable piece of software that has support for a lot of web comics out of the box. Obviously, re-hosting web comics is a murky, at best, territory, but this will easily allow local only access for your personal benefit. [1]: https://github.com/jodal/comics https://github.com/jodal/comics
- msandford 10y ago
  No, I hadn't seen that yet. Thanks! I think rehosting is pretty bad, copyright infringement at best and not very nice to boot. That's why I decided that cropping and thumbnailing would be the way to go; enough of a picture to let someone say "yeah I saw that one already" but not so much that they don't go to the artist's site to see new comics.