Webcomics Tracking

Go figure. Of the things I've blogged this round, the one generating the most interesting and intense conversation over the last couple of days has been a little sentence-fragment bullet item in my whiny little to-do list post. "A webcomics aggregator / feed thing." That was my whole pitch.

Apparently I hit a nerve. When a geek hits a nerve, they poke at it…

Here's what I want. Maybe it already exists. If not, maybe I can talk someone into building it for me. Or at least building it with me.

• A freedb.org-like public listing of webcomics. Yes, I know, there are already 50 of these. The thing that freedb.org has, that as far as I know none of these have, is the ability for tools to automatically upload and download this data. (Of course I also want web upload and download.) I also want start (and end) dates, frequency of publication, etc. I'll take what I can get. Most importantly, each comic should have some kind of code-based description of how to tell when the comic has updated, as well as the date/time of the last update.
• A Firefox extension for configuring a set of comics to be browsed. It would leverage the database to show only those comics with new updates.
• An RSS feed server to complement the Firefox extension, in the style of the existing RSS comic feeds.

I think these things together meet my use case. The other architecture that might work is one Jamey and I discussed: The Firefox extension and RSS feeder, but with P2P capabilities to maintain the comics listr in a distributed fashion.

Oh well. Someday. (B)