Get OUT:

Hi, quite a few people have emailed me about comics not updating. I’m in Thailand at the moment on holidays so I’m not going to get the chance to look at these until the 18th.

So please use the contact page sparingly until I get back. There’s not a lot I can do. Thanks.

A few people have informed me that the comic slurper was mentioned on the MacBreak Weekly podcast.

If you want to listen, download the mp3 then skip ahead to 80 mins 56 seconds.

They are pretty enthusiastic about it which is nice. I’m not sure how long they have been using it but I think they’d be surprised to learn the comic slurper is quite old, it’ll be 10 years old next year in fact.

Some comments on what they said:

• “It has pretty much every comic strip availalable on the web”. That’s extremely flattering. Sadly the slurper doesn’t have anywhere near it.
• A good guess to be sure, but the back-end code is perl (not python).
• “It’s darkgate or it’s nothing.” — Cheers.
• The list of comics (presumably they are talking about the Choose! page) should be alphabetised top to bottom rather than left to right. It’s a good point, I never use that page so I didn’t realise how annoying that was. I’ll fix it.
• They’d also like to be able to register so they can log in from multiple computers and have it save their comics list. Sadly they aren’t the first to request this, it’s been on my todo list for a while now. I’ve always been against registration though (I hate how you have to register on almost every site you use these days) so if I do implement this it’ll be voluntary only.
• They don’t mention the RSS feed. IMO the RSS feed is the best way to read comics on the slurper, I never use the web page anymore. Haven’t for years… I read the comic RSS feed in Google Reader instead. This would also solve their problem of their comics list not being available on multiple PCs.

One last thing, if any of you MacBreak weekly subscribers are reading this. They recommend Applegeeks as a fun comic for Mac-enthusiasts, can I also recommend Joy of Tech to you as well. I don’t personally own any Apple stuff but I still find this strip extremely funny (and it’s very Apple focused).

Right, after weeks (yes weeks) of sorting out the comic slurper I have finally.. no, FINALLY caught up with the suggestions queue. I don’t think I’ve had 0 comics in the suggestion queue for at least a year (probably two).

The way I managed to do it was to do 20 a day, 3 days a week. It was a weekly commitment, almost like going to the gym… “Ah farrrk, it’s Thursday and I’ve only done 1 slurper day this week”.

But it’s done now. Note that because there are so many comics these days I’m being EXTRMELY RUTHLESS with what I add and don’t add. There seems to be a lot of people suggesting comics, and a lot of these people are stupid. Here’s some examples of comics I won’t add:

• Comics that HAVE FINISHED – Whats that, you just found the archives from an old webcomic that finished 2 years ago and you’ve just fallen in love with it? Well good for you, read the archives, but don’t suggest it because it DOESN’T UPDATE REGULARLY. So the slurper has nothing to slurp. Make sense?
• No author – Look, if you can’t be arsed putting the author of the comic in the little text box, then I can’t be arsed adding it. And no, “I don’t know”, “look it up”, and “abcd” don’t count.
• Individual image URLs – Some people seem to think that suggesting some.long.url/image.gif is a website that updates on a regular basis. Here’s a tip: IT’S NOT. I could probably work out the site the image came from, and do the rest but I can’t be arsed with that. I’m lazy. See item 2.
• Pr0n/Weather map/Astronomy sites – No, I’m not joking. Seriously people, sort it out.

In other news, my ****ING COPY of ****ING GTA4 hasn’t ****ING TURNED UP YET. Yes, Ebay and Australia Post, please go **** yourselves. Every single ****ING person on my xbox ****ING FRIENDS LIST is playing ****ING GTA4.

..and no, you can’t blame that violent outburst on GTA4. Cos I haven’t played it yet.