Subscribing to The Far Side (by RSS!)

Update 23 November 2022: This isn’t how I consume The Far Side in my RSS reader any more. There’s an updated guide.

Prior to his retirement in 1995 I managed to amass a collection of almost all of Gary Larson’s The Far Side books as well as a couple of calendars and other thingamabobs. After 24 years of silence I didn’t expect to hear anything more from him and so I was as surprised as most of the Internet was when he re-emerged last year with a brand new on his first ever website. Woah.

The Far Side by Gary Larson

Larson’s hinted that there might be new and original content there someday, but for the time being I’m just loving that I can read The Far Side comments (legitimately) via the Web for the first time! The site’s currently publishing a “Daily Dose” of classic strips, which is awesome. But… I don’t want to have to go to a website to get comics every day. Nor do I want to have to remember which days I’ve caught-up with, yet. That’s a job for computers, right? And it’s a solved problem: RSS (which has been around for almost as long as Larson hasn’t) and similar technologies allow a website to publicise that it’s got updates available in a way that people can “subscribe” to, so I should just use that, right?

Except… the new The Far Side website doesn’t have an RSS feed. Boo! Luckily, I’m not above automating the creation of feeds for websites that I wish had them, even (or perhaps especially) where that involves a little reverse-engineering of online comics. So with a little thanks to my RSS middleware RSSey… I can now read daily The Far Side comics in the way that’s most-convenient to me: right alongside my other subscriptions in my feed reader.

The Far Side comics in Dan's RSS reader.
How screen scrapers are made.

I’m afraid I’m not going to publicly1-share a ready-to-go feed URL for this one, unlike my BBC News Without The Sport feed, because a necessary side-effect of the way it works is that the ads are removed. And if I were to republish a feed containing The Far Side website cartoons but with the ads stripped I’d be guilty of, like, all the ethical and legal faults that Larson was trying to mitigate by putting his new website up in the first place! I love The Far Side and I certainly don’t want to violate its copyright!

But – at least until Larson’s web developer puts up a proper feed (with or without ads) – for those of us who like our comics delivered fresh to us every morning, here’s the source code (as an RSSey feed definition) you could use to run your own personal-use-only “give me The Far Side Daily Dose as an RSS feed” middleware.

Thanks for deciding to join us on the Internet, Gary. I hear it’s going to be a big thing, someday!

Footnotes

1 Friends are welcome to contact me off-blog for an address if they like, if they promise to be nice and ethical about it.

×

Which emoji scissors close?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things. Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant criterion.

I’ve watched from afar as the Internet collapsed in on itself during a debate about what a cheeseburger looks like and I’ve raged a little myself at the popular depiction of juggling, but this newly-identified emoji failure is a whole new thing. Sure, emoji are supposed to be representative, not realistic. But if they have to cover sufficient diversity to include gender-neutral representations (which they absolutely should, and should have done in an early instance, but at least we’re fixing some of the issues in hindsight, like Ido did) then perhaps they could also include sufficient attention to detail that the tools they depict would actually, y’know, work?