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.)

Update: It’s here.

See all three, as well as a good summary of why they think this is a good idea, on their CC-licensed works page.

There’s a Kessel story in The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (“The Red Phone”) and it’s very short, very odd and very funny. But even if I couldn’t recommend the author I’d still be shouting about this. Releasing books in free digital editions is still basically a risky experiment: Small Beer are assuming (or hoping) that more people will pay for the book with the free release than without it. If everyone just reads the pdf, then they lose; but if the online release gets people on board who wouldn’t otherwise know that they like Kessel, and then those people buy the book, then they win. (Even better if the release gets people to the Small Beer page who haven’t read Kelly Link or don’t realise that their lives are incomplete without a subscription LCRW.)

I want the experiment to succeed for a terribly selfish reason: I want more publishers releasing free pdf copies of their books, so I can read more without paying more. So I want you, gentle reader, to go on over to Small Beer and check out John Kessel, discover you like him, and buy his book. And tell your friends, post on your blogs, &c. &c. (Extra credit for anyone who manages to remix the collection into something creative and new!)

Sifting through my recommendations I found Changing Babies by Deborah Moggach. You can bet I clicked that button labelled “Why” in double-quick time, and found: “Because you own: Colloquial Greek.”

So either Olga has something to tell me, or there are some pretty unexpected correlations buried in the mountain of data LT is working from.

Update: The same book also backs up a recommendation for the Lonely Planet Condensed Guide to … San Francisco.

“I’m in a complicated relationship on facebook yet single on bebo.”

Awesome.

(Ok, after reading his post about the spread of the meme I’m a bit less breathless. Still pink though.)

It’s a nice idea: take the top 20 artists from your profile, and for each one pull out the five most similar artists. Some of them will be duplicates, so the number of distinct entries in the list tells you something about how dissimilar those first 20 are, with a possible maximum score of 100 (and minimum of 20 I suppose, unless you have a degenerate profile containing less than 20 artists). The author has a few other nice scripts if you’ve got a long compile on the burn…

Notes:

1. I’ll admit that I’m gaming the stats to try for an increase: having Béla Fleck and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones can’t be helping, and one play-through of my Auktyon album will bump the Fleckster off the bottom of the list…

(There are also a couple more shots in the Amsterdam miscellany — the sky today was incredible, crisscrossed with many many contrails, and as the sun got low in the sky I went and skulked around under my friends the cranes for a while, peering up and snapping at their underbellies.)