I’ve made a number of enhancements to the comics aggregator, added a bunch of comics, and made others comics more reliable.
This takes a lot of time. If you’re using the aggregator regularly and not supporting it on Patreon, you should feel bad.
GoComics strips have returned. I have a workaround for being blocked by the site which doesn’t allow me to load comics in real-time, but I can get the loaded eventually. I am attempting to load all comics in the background throughout the day, so hopefully by the time you go to read your comics the ones you want will be there, but if not then see below.
These new comics have been added:
- 9 to 5
- Aaggghhhh
- The Academia Waltz
- Adult Children
- Agnes
- AJ and Magnus
- Alley Oop
- Amanda the Great
- Andertoons
- Angry Little Girls
- Animal Crackers
- Annie
- Ask Shagg
- Back to B.C.
- bacon
- Baldo en Español
- Ballard Street
- Barkeater Lake
- The Barn
- Barney & Clyde
- Batch Rejection
- Ben
- Benitin y Eneas
- Big Nate
- The Big Picgture
- Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog
- Bliss
- Bloom County
- Bob the Angry Flower
- Bob the Squirrel
- Bo Nanas
- Boomerangs
- Bottomliners
- Bozo
- Breaking Cat News
- The Buckets
- Buckles
- Buni
I will continue to work my way through GoComics and add strips to the aggregator as time permits. If there’s a specific GoComics script you’d like me to add out of order, let me know.
The comics list is now much easier to read. Comics are listed in columns which resize dynamically based on the screen width, and there are section headers so you can scroll quickly when looking for specific comics.
When a GoComics comic is not currently available but the aggregator thinks it should be, the error that is displayed now includes a link to the source page for the comic, so you can click through and read the comic on GoComics if the only reason it’s missing from the aggregator is because it’s being blocked.
For comics that are available from multiple sources, the aggregator now attempts to fetch from all possible sources in preference order by quality (i.e., resolution). This should improve comic availability and how early in the day they’re available.
The aggregator is now smarter about detecting when it is being blocked by GoComics and won’t keep trying to fetch comics, which should decrease page load times.
Availability information has been configured into the aggregator for a number of additional comics, which means both that the page will load faster on days when they’re not published if you read any of those comics, and that you won’t see errors about those comics on the days they’re not available.
However, there are a number of “intermittent” comics which publish on inconsistent days so I can’t configure availability information for them. These will continue to show up with errors on the page if you read them, on days when they aren’t published. Currently these are:
- AJ and Magnus
- bacon
- The Big Picture
- Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog
These comics that are no longer being published have been removed:
- Brenda Starr
- Ink Pen
- Noodle Scratchers
Additional miscellaneous notes about specific comics:
- “1 and Done” is back to being fetched from GoComics instead of ArcaMax. For some reason the ArcaMax version is only published three days per week whereas the GoComics version is five days per week, and the strips are different on the days they overlap (!!) so one can’t really serve as a backup of the other.
- There were briefly two redundant “Broom-Hilda” comics listed, one without the hyphen. This is fixed.
- The recently added ArcaMax “Humor Me” comic was added broken and has now been fixed.
