20061014

Lazy web request

Given that youchoob has just been bought for $1.6M dollars (a lot of cash, I'll warrant, but you would have thought google could have stumped for a few dollars more to make it the round $2M), I thought that I'd throw out a brilliant idea that someone else can take and be the next internet paper millionaire, because I'm too lazy to do it myself.

The issue is the following: there are loads of web comics out there that I'd like to get around to reading: something positive, sinfest, heck, even doonesbury has thirty something years of back story that I'd like to catch up on.

But I don't have the time or patience to sit down and work through the entire archives of a web comic in an afternoon or twenty. And whenever I've tried to click through a few comics in a few spare minutes, I inevitably forget where I got to last time, and then lose the tab that had the comic in it in an overzealous tab closing attack.

So what I want to do is harness the power of RSS, which is how I deal with the rest of my information overload, and how I keep up with the latest editions of Doonesbury and Dilbert.

So what I need is a way to create an RSS feed for archived material, that drip feeds me little chunks of comics on a daily basis, so I can slowly catch up. A feed that gives me five episodes of doonesbury a day, say, and I'll be all caught up in, ooh, 6 years or so. But at least it will be manageable, and my rss reader can then keep track of what I've seen already.

I even have a name for my invention: the Archive RSS Serialization Engine. So if you want to take my idea for an ARSE, and make yourself possibly hundreds of dollars when Google or Microsoft finally buy it, then please help yourself.

If no one else does it, then I might get onto it myself. When I finally get around to building my household server, it surely can't be that difficult to set up a cron job to run a perl script that will automatically generate an RSS XML file that I can feed into my favourite RSS reader? I'd just much prefer someone else to do it for me...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, this gets you half way there (firefox plugin rather than the, preferable, rss idea):

http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/10/automatic-last-read-bookmark.html