Webcomic Archives
Friday, August 20 2004 at 17:45 RantI'm a bit annoyed at the way most webcomic people handle their archives. Some come out several times a week, so they tend to rack up quite a big archive over time. And some times, I want to find a particular strip I remember to be funny or insightful. You know, to send to people.
Unfortunately, the archives tend to be just a list of dates. "There was a comic posted on June 27, 24, 20, 17, etc." Well, thanks for letting me know. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me find the strip I'm looking for. I remember approximately what the strip was about, but not on which date it was posted - if I knew that I wouldn't need to go through the archives! It gets even worse when the comics don't have a title, and all you have to go on is the date, which is exactly what you want to find out.
Is it really too much to ask that when a webcomic artist makes a strip, he writes down a few helpful keywords to describe what the strip is about? It takes about 10 seconds and would make searching infinitely easier and improve the experience for everyone involved.
Ah, yes, well, some more computer-friendly (user-friendly? :P) artists have been doing just that.
http://www.userfriendly.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?form=strip&searchobject=BeOS
How about an archive of transcripts? Or a netcomics archive that runs OCR software on each strip? Would take a few hours to add that and a proper search system.
All of those are good suggestions. The OCR one might be overkill. Strips usually contain little enough text for manual transcription to be viable.
Some webcomics already do this, but most still don't.
http://www.nichtlustig.de/ does that. It also happens to have the coolest interface of all webcartoons evar.