SUBSCRIBING TO THE FAR SIDE (BY RSS!)
       
       2020-01-08
       
       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.
       
       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.
       
 (IMG) Screenshot showing The Far Side in my RSS reader
       
       I'm afraid I'm not going to publicly (Friends are welcome to contact me
       off-blog for an address if they like, if they promise to be nice and ethical
       about it.)-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!
       
       LINKS
       
 (DIR) My updated guide to subscribing to The Far Side in an RSS reader
 (HTM) "A letter from Gary Larson"
 (HTM) The Far Side
 (DIR) https://www.thefarside.com/
 (HTM) Blog post in which I add an RSS feed to somebody else's site
 (HTM) Blog post: Leak in Comic Chameleon
 (HTM) RSSey
 (HTM) Blog post: BBC News without the sport
 (HTM) RSSey source code for The Far Side subscription