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Topic: Update tracking

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Author Topic: Update tracking
jreinsch
  • Posts: 9
 Date Posted: Apr 06, 2008 - 2:39 am - Subject: Update tracking

As a grain of sand on the beach of webcomics, I'm a member of now 5 comic lists, including this one. They bring me a lot of hits. One of the more innovative ones is thewebcomiclist, which uses a spider script to track updates. They do so by checking your site's front page for a comment in the following format:

 {!-- Last Update: 31/07/2007 -->


*NOTE: the "!" there is supposed to be following a pointy brace, not a curly one, but this forum strips out those when I try to post them. Replace my curlies with pointies. Likewise below.*

Now, I, being occasionally industrious, even wrote code into my copy of Comicpress (a popular Wordpress theme for webcomics, for those unaware - it makes my life very easy) to automate creation of that comment. Here is that code. In the file functions.php for the comicpress theme, i inserted the
following two lines:


 $WCLDate = mysql2date('d/m/Y', $post->post_date);

 echo "{!-- Last Update: $WCLDate -->\n";

These go in the function that displays the comic. It should be fairly easy to find. If anyone needs better instructions, contact me and I'll pull the function out of my code. I'm too lazy to do it right this second.
The point is, my site and probably a few others already have comments in the code showing the latest comic update date. All a creative webmaster would have to do is write a little spider script to check each comic once a day for that code and suddenly everyone on webcomicz could have their update schedule/history right there in black and white.

For an example in action (and because I haven't set up a sig here yet to link my comic) please see
http://www.close-to-the-chest.com/ - feel free to snoop in the page's code for the comment, and check the archived pages and see that the comment is generated on-the-fly by the script that displays the comic. (okay, take my word for it, cause you can't see my php)

Again, anyone who wants a copy, I'll gladly send over my actual comic-display function. How about it, webmaster?

Signature http://close-to-the-chest.com/
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webcomicz
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 130
WebcomicZ
 Date Posted: Apr 06, 2008 - 4:07 pm - Subject: RE: Update tracking

Thanks for the suggestion,

I'd love to do this, or something similar, and I have, infact, been trying to find a way to spider and track as many comics as possible (preferrably without the authors' actually needing to do anything).

I did a test with the information you provided. Only 9 comics in my database had the "Last Updated" tag on their page.

Sadly, I haven't found a perfect solution for tracking updates. Even my adding the RSS Feed field to the comic submission form hasn't been perfect as each RSS Feed is different. Some include images, some just links, and some include news, Etc.

Now, like you suggested, chances are I will need to have webcomic authors put something in their html for me to read. In which case, this seems like a possible solution.

Again, thanks, I'll look into it some more. If you have any more tips, suggestions or idea, please feel free to let me know. I'm working hard to make this site better every day... well, mostly every weekend.

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