This idea I give free and gratis to teh internets, in the hopes that somebody more technically adept will implement it: a converter to turn a sequential archive into a delayed-update rss feed.

Ever discover a new webcomic? And have your productivity drop to zero while you rampage through an archive backlog of several hundred episodes over a number of years? Imagine if you could drop that comic into your feedreader just like all the others, only you’d get two or three or five episodes per day, until you’d caught up.

It could be a spider: tell it which part of the archive page you want as the feed post, and which part is the link to the next entry (if entries have sequentially-numbered urls all the better, but guaranteed each one will have a link to Next and Previous). You also tell the spider how often you want to increment the feed (this stone kills two birds: you get dripfed your comic, and the spider doesn’t hammer the hell out of the comic server).

Now go forth and implement, ye lazyweb!

Update: As I say in the comment below, I’ve sort of started work on an implementation using Dapper for the scraping (thanks Erik for the suggestion). But in case anyone else likes the idea and is less inept or lazy than I am, here’s my suggestion for the name: dripfeed. Obvious once you’ve thought of it. (“Archive-to-rss”? Why would you use rss as an archive format? Stupid-pants.)