2018/serials
IndieWeb for Webcomics was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2018.
Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/serials
IndieWebCamp Portland 2018
Session: IndieWeb for Web comics
When: 2018-06-26 16:45
Participants
- Jamey Sharp (session facilitator and proposal)
Jason McIntosh
Jim Pick
Notes
Jamey Sharp built Comic Rocket™, a sort of aggregator for webcomics readers. It's not RSS, because it's interested in collections more than streams.
He wants to switch to using open standards though. Is it possible to do this with RSS? What about using a podcastish model?
RSS feed readers don't have great support for the pure-link posts that RSS supports, but which Jamey & Comic Rocket needs this.
"Comic Chameleon" is a service that braids up a lot of webcomics, but creators have to do special things just for it to get picked it; it doesn't use standards.
- jmac asks: Why not just make a podcast app, except for comics?
- Jamey: Well, UX is hard (and not his thing)
RFC 5005 is a feed archiving & past-episode-access spec that nobody has implemented -- Jamey would love to be able use it! It's a very simple spec; creators *do* have to add a couple (literally a couple) extra bits of metadata to thier websites for it to work
An RFC 5005-aware client would work fine with comics that don't have it (which of course would be almost all of them, at first). But if it does, it'll add lots of amazing and subtle little kindnesses, and ways that will allow creators to magicaly manage how their older work appears -- as organized collections -- on readers. And furthermore, the UX will be desiged for seeing things as collections, and not as little bits flying down a stream that are either read or unread (and nagging you to read it).
Jamey wants to have other people go make this thing - all the specs and tech is there, in theory. (Work in microsub somehow as well?) Jamey would be happy to answer questions about theory and such based on his own experience!
jmac recommends that Jamey write a blog post and hook into into IndieNews.