October 17, 2025
Many years ago I used to read a site called Websnark. It was written by a guy named Eric, and among other things it wrote about webcomics as literary works worth looking at critically. I found more than a couple comics through his reviews. I'm pretty sure it's also where I think I saw the phrase "daily trawl" to describe loading a set of bookmarks with all the comics that updated on a certain day.
I have something similar to this day, my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox is a set of tags for each day of the week. Every morning while I have my coffee I read the ones that updated that morning. And some with more sporadic schedules that I check every day just to make sure.
That last batch got me thinking: it'd be nice to have an automated process do the checking for me before I go and load a full page just to find out there's nothing new. It could request a site's RSS feed on a particular schedule, or fall back to a header request for the regular site. Failing that there could be screen scraping, but that's almost never worth it. But then I could hook it up to a database and have a lightweight page that provides me links to what had updated since the last time I checked.
It seemed like it might be a good idea. It was absolutely going to be a case of "we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy." But it always sat there in the back of my mind, waiting for... something to happen to make me want to spend the hundreds of hours to get it built.
The two main advantages to it were that loading smaller text files (or the headers) was a lot less of a load on the web servers than just hitting fetching all the images and such. And living on a web server itself, I could take my bookmarks with me when I traveled.
All of these things are less of a problem nowadays. For starters, webcomics just ain't what they used to be. Sure, they're still around -- Questionable Content, one of the comics I found through Websnark, is more than 20 years old now -- but there don't seem to be as many as there used to be. Hell, Websnark hasn't written about webcomics since 2009 as far as I can tell. My bookmark tag with the most comics in it is Monday, with ten. Two of those are the "update whenever" type, and one of them is APOD, which isn't actually a comic.
Almost everything that updates regularly does so automatically these days, so tagging F5 for half the morning isn't necessary any more. The comic either goes up at 12:00:01 AM or it doesn't. With so few to keep track of I don't need a portable list any more -- and if I did, browsers nowadays support bookmark syncing.
So, this thing that started out as a thought exercise and never got much farther than that wound up dying before it could be born. The world it was envisioned for no longer exists. In that sense I'm glad I never bothered with it. On the other hand I still remember the concept, and it might have been fun... in a programmer's masochistic definition of "fun".
