The Internet: Not a Good Hiding Place

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Comics are one of those things that just make sense to subscribe to in a newsreader. If it doesn’t come to you, you probably won’t bother to go get it. That’s why I really appreciate the feeds at Tapestry. When Tapestry stopped carrying feeds from UComics (because he was forced to by the people at UComics who don’t understand how to treat their customers), I decided to throw together my own feed for my own use.

After I’d been using Bloglines for a while, I discovered that other people were subscribed to my comics feed as well. Now, I didn’t really mind, since the bandwidth use was almost nothing. But, I didn’t want to have the UComics people coming after me for republishing their comics, like they did to Tapestry. So, I moved the feed, and when I subscribed to the new feed in Bloglines, I chose the option, “Access: Private.”

Yeah, no, that doesn’t do what you think it does.

It keeps the feed from showing up in your personal blogroll, but it still appears in the Bloglines directory.

Which means people found it again, so I’m moving it again. But, to show I’m not completely, “sellin’ out to the man,” I’m putting the code here for people to use if they want to setup their own private feed:

Download mycomics.php

It’s pretty simple. To use as is, just unzip it and upload the file to your web server. You could add more comics to it — the UComics “formula” for URLs isn’t hard to figure out. Anyway, it’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, so do with it what you will.