following up on the hugely popular computer game quizes I made some months ago, I bring you… the comic quiz. How many of these strips do you recognize?

The list is mostly compiled on the basis of what I read every day. Yes, that’s a lot. No, that’s not even all of it. Click on the image above to get to the quiz. And let’s hear which strips you thought should have been included!

If you have Thunderbird 0.8 installed, here’s how to read your favourite strips in an easy way:

1. Create an RSS account.
Tools -> Account settings -> Add Account -> RSS News & Blogs -> Finish the wizard.

2. Find an RSS feed for the strip.
Dilbert for example is at http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf

3. Add the RSS feed.
Select your new account, and from the options on the right-hand side, choose “View settings for this account”, then click “Manage Subscriptions”. Select Add, and enter http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf as the Feed URL. Make sure to check the “Show the article summary…” box.

You now have a folder that receives new Dilbert comics daily. Repeat with other cartoons you like. For some ideas, check out these sites:

http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ (Feed Url in the “RSS Feed” column)

http://atheos.de/funnies/ (Feed URL behind the little RSS icons)

I’ve added a RSS feed for english Pondus strips to my site.

Pondus is currently a favourite comic strip of mine. It’s Norwegian like Nemi, and it has a very unusual kind of humour not found in most syndicated cartoons. I’m sure the suthor is influenced by Calvin & Hobbes in some ways, although his subject matter is completely different. check it out.

Thinking of adding a norwegian feed as well.

New Strips: Diesel Sweeties, Goobs, Monkey Business available from the Instant Funnies page

More Strips: MegaTokyo, Elf Life, Saturnalia available at the Instant Funnies.

Want to have your daily dose of cartoons sent to you every morning? I made my own cartoon RSS feed system last night. Rather than wait for Tapestry‘s David thomson to add more strips, I wanted to build my own feeds, and I made the code pretty generic, so adding new strips is usually a two minute job.

So despite what I said earlier, here’s my own list of links: The Instant Funnies. Like David, I am not a lawyer, and while I am pretty sure that under German law, this server is not hosting anything illegal, I may be wrong. In which case I don’t mind being corrected.

My feeds currently cover only the list of comics that I read and that aren’t on tapestry. Also, some strips like Sluggy Freelance are a pain to feed, because of the crazy sunday format. That aside, adding feeds for most strips is easy, and I feel generous enough: If you want your favourite strip added to the list, and it’s not on tapestry already, drop me a line, address is at the bottom of the feeds page.

Tapestry makes me wonder what copyright law has to say about links to a comic in an RSS feed. This guy offers feeds for a number of United Media comics, PvP Online, and others. The idea is great – I don’t hae to hit the comics sites several times a day to find out if PvP has finally updated, and I save time because I can get all my daily strips on a single page (thanks to FeedDemon‘s execllent ‘Newspaper’ feature).

Since a lot of the strips I read are missing, and he hasn’t added feeds for a while, I’ve written my own script with a MySQL backend and plugins for different types of comic pages. All I have to do now to get another comic feed is to add a little data about the strip’s URL into a database, and run the feed update once. Dead simple. All in 150 lines of python. I’m not sure if I should make them public, though – copyright questions and the load on this server kinda make me want to keep them to myself for now. Although uploading them somewhere else would of course be possible…

Penny Arcade