A thought: Read­ing blogs through RSS or Atom feeds is a great way to get chunks of infor­ma­tion deliv­ered on a daily basis. I think that this format is amenable to deliv­er­ing some­thing like a text­book: every day you could post a subchapter-​sized chunk of infor­ma­tion. Since I’m already set­ting aside time in my day to check Google Reader, the mar­ginal cost of adding one new feed isn’t very much.

Com­pare this to the cost of get­ting a text­book and find­ing time in the day to read it reg­u­larly. Adding a new task to one’s rou­tine is always a tricky propo­si­tion, and I doubt I’m the only person who has dif­fi­cultly com­mit­ting to these sorts of things. For exam­ple: how many people stick to their New Year’s res­o­lu­tions after the first month? Or even the first week?

But let’s say you shimmy the new habit into an exist­ing rou­tine (e.g., deliv­er­ing a text­book via a web feed). That is, trick your­self into doing some­thing new by making it look like some­thing old. Well then, my friend! You might just have a higher suc­cess rate.

I’ve seen a few blogs that kinda do this. One exam­ple is James Tauber’s Poincaré Project, which walks you through the math­e­mat­ics required to under­stand the famous Poincaré con­jec­ture¹. How­ever, if a reader comes to the site after the project has started they poten­tially have to read an archive­ful of arti­cles to get up to speed. In this case they have essen­tially the same bar­rier to entry as with a textbook.

To get around this prob­lem, users should be able to sign up for a per­son­al­ized feed that gives them asyn­chro­nous daily updates drawn from the blog’s archives.

Let me explain. Let’s imag­ine a blog that attempts to teach its read­ers com­puter sci­ence. Like a text­book, the first post starts by cov­er­ing the absolute basics (”What is a computer?”); over time it builds to more com­pli­cated con­cepts (oh, let’s say… con­cur­rency). Unfor­tu­nately, by this point the blog’s RSS feed is use­less to new read­ers: they won’t under­stand the most recent updates with­out having slogged through months of archives. The big idea behind the blog-​textbook² is basi­cally bupkus.

To resolve this prob­lem, what if there were button on the front page that said “Subscribe from the Beginning”? New read­ers sub­scribe with this link just as they would any other feed. But unlike a reg­u­lar feed, when they go to Google Reader they don’t see the newest post about con­cur­rent pro­gram­ming. Instead it’s the first update, the one explain­ing what a com­puter is. And the next day, they won’t see some incom­pre­hen­si­ble post about locks and sem­a­phores. No—it will be the second update ever, per­haps a brief overview of the his­tory of com­puter sci­ence. And so on and so on: the new reader con­tin­u­ally receives updates—just offset by a few months. It’s as though they stum­bled across the blog right when it began.

Inci­den­tally, such a per­son­al­ized asyn­chro­nous feed could work beau­ti­fully for web­comics. Comic archives can become intim­i­dat­ing pretty quickly, and many require sev­eral hours’ com­mit­ment to pore through. (*cough* *cough*) Some people might enjoy such marathon ses­sions, but it takes time and I often find myself rush­ing through things, not enjoy­ing the strips as much as I should, becom­ing desen­si­tized to the jokes and art after hun­dreds of doses. The “Tag This Comic” func­tion­al­ity (now ubiq­ui­tous thanks to Comic­Press) is a step in the right direc­tion since it helps break an archive crawl over sev­eral sessions—but it’s still not quite there.

But if I could have comics deliv­ered to me one day at a time from the very beginning—as though I’d sub­scribed to the comic right at its incep­tion? I’d def­i­nitely be more amenable to read­ing some of the long-​running web­comics I’m cur­rently miss­ing out on.³

You know, I assume that archive intim­i­da­tion is a big prob­lem for long-​running story-​based strips. In fact, I wouldn’t be sur­prised if it were the single biggest bar­rier to growth for well-​established web­comics. If I were making my living off my strip, I’d be hugely con­cerned about it. That’s why I’m sur­prised to see so many big web­comics still rely­ing on story guides and “New Readers” tabs.⁴ Aside from the “Tag This Comic” inno­va­tion, what else is there?⁵⁶

I’m not saying this per­son­al­ized asyn­chro­nous doohickey idea of mine is a panacea. For one thing, its use would nec­es­sar­ily be lim­ited to people who know what the heck it is. Few enough people under­stand (or choose to use) reg­u­lar feeds, so I don’t know how many new users this idea would snag. Then again, if some­one were to code up a solution—say, as a handy Word­press plug-in—it would be triv­ial and cost-​free for a blog­ger or web­car­toon­ist to add to their site.⁷

And now, only after having writ­ten this long man­i­festo, the pos­si­bil­ity that I am not the first person to have con­ceived this idea has finally crossed my mind. If anyone has heard of some­thing that does this sort of thing—well, that’s what com­ments are for.

¹ “Every simply con­nected, closed 3-manifold is home­o­mor­phic to the 3-sphere.” I know what each of those words means inde­pen­dently. I only have trou­ble when you put them all together like that.
² If this idea catches on then we absolutely need to start call­ing them blext­books. Oh my god yes we need to do that.
³ Oh, and here’s an added bonus: if the comic in ques­tion updates less-than-daily, then your per­son­al­ized de-​synched feed will grad­u­ally catch up with the main strip over time! For exam­ple, if I’m sub­scribed to the archive of a Monday-Wednesday-Friday web­comic, my per­sonal feed will update from the archive every day. The strip itself, on the other hand, updates only three times a week. Thus, I’m gain­ing ground on the newest updates by four strips a week. If the archive has 200 strips, I’ll be caught up in about a year.
⁴ No, I’m not being a hyp­ocrite. (1) I agree that a well-​written story guide/cast page page is def­i­nitely a bang-​up idea and can go a long way. (Look to Octo­pus Pie for stel­lar exam­ples.) (2) Chronillogical’s archives aren’t that daunt­ing (rel­a­tively speak­ing). (3) It’s a matter of incen­tives. John and I don’t make a living from Chronil­log­i­cal. I’m merely sur­prised that people with strong incen­tives to attract new read­ers aren’t inno­vat­ing more. (Of course, it could be that the prob­lem is to some degree insol­u­ble.)
⁵Well, there’s always the pos­si­bil­ity of a reboot. That’s what Kris Straub did at the begin­ning of this year with Starslip, when (among other rea­sons) he felt that the strip’s com­pli­cated back­story was dis­cour­ag­ing new read­er­ship. And John Alli­son cited archive intim­i­da­tion as one of the rea­sons he’s replac­ing Scary-Go-Round with a new strip. That said, there are obvi­ous prob­lems to this approach. John Alli­son runs the risk of aban­don­ing a story, char­ac­ters, and a brand that he’s spent years build­ing up. Kris Straub’s reboot was def­i­nitely a suc­cess, but many read­ers will still prob­a­bly see the large archives and be intim­i­dated. Regard­less of what­ever assur­ances you may give them, some people just don’t like jump­ing into a story mid-​stream. Heck, I’ve been unwill­ing to jump into gag-a-day strips with­out read­ing the archives. It’s irra­tional, but some people just like being com­pletists.
⁶ You can always tell when my thought processes become mud­dled and befud­dled because the foot­note den­sity increases dra­mat­i­cally.
⁷ “Greg!” I hear you say. “Greg! Are you not a recently grad­u­ated com­puter sci­en­tist? Could you, per­haps, be the one who codes such an inge­nious diver­sion? Is that not a possibility?” True enough, dear reader. True enough. How­ever, I have much on my plate at the moment (read: job search) and I am not at all famil­iar with the intri­ca­cies of feeds. That said, if anyone is inter­ested in col­lab­o­rat­ing with me on such a project, feel free to get in touch.

Two things:

• It would seem as though my timing is impec­ca­ble. This very day same day I write my dia­tribe about asyn­chro­nous RSS thinga­ma­jig­gers, David Morgan-​Mar of Irreg­u­lar Web­comic announces that he’s got it cov­ered. He even gave it a catchy name: Archive Binge. Now, I haven’t actu­ally tried it yet (I’ve been busy—see point below) so I can’t judge, but it may very well be the answer I was look­ing for.

  [EDIT: After trying out the site, I must say I'm impressed. But I have con­cerns. First, every­thing is fun­neled through their site: you need to reg­is­ter to use the ser­vice, which cre­ates a bar­rier to use. Also, the selec­tion of feeds is some­what lim­ited (though they already have some heavy hit­ters like Won­der­mark and Dr. McN­inja). This isn't too sur­pris­ing, given how young the site is (1 day old). I hope and expect that the number of par­tic­i­pat­ing will strips increase substantially.

  How­ever! The process for adding your site to the list is not pain­less. From the FAQ, they need:

  A way to figure out the URL of the web page con­tain­ing each strip, given the strip number. This can be done three ways:

  1. If you can give us a sprintf format string, into which we can just plug the number, that's great.
  2. If your comics are indexed by date or some other method that doesn't map neatly to strip number, then we need a list of the strip page URLs, in order. In most cases, a simple direc­tory list­ing should suffice.
  3. If your site struc­ture is obvi­ous enough to us, we can prob­a­bly just work it out our­selves. We'll let you know if we can do this.

  I'm not sure how many cre­ators are will­ing to do this. Fur­ther­more, a ton of web­comics nowa­days are using Comic­Press, which cre­ates page URLs in a way that seems rather incom­pat­i­ble with Archive Binge's system.

  My ver­dict: Archive Binge seems like a ser­vice geared more towards the hard­core web­comics reader than the aver­age user. It's def­i­nitely a useful tool, and I heartily com­mend David Morgan-​Mar (and co.) for being leagues ahead of me on this one. But I still think some­thing like a Word­press plug-​in would be extremely valu­able to cre­ators. Direct­ing read­ers through a third-​party site is not the most user-​friendly propo­si­tion. A simple link on the front page of a blog/comic would be best.]

• For unknown rea­sons, the data­base went down ear­lier today. I was able to restore it from a backup, but we lost com­ments. Specif­i­cally, I believe we lost two com­ments from Cliff, one from me, and one from galatae. My apolo­gies! To make up for the loss, I offi­cially offer Cliff and galatae a full refund of their sub­scrip­tion to Chronillogical.