Quick RSS survey
I thought it would be welcome if the updates delivered by RSS would have the same dimension as the strips on the website (980 pixel) instead of just 380 pixel. However, the “reach” of the last two strips put online dropped by other a third.
So I’d like to ask you what resolution I should use in the future. I must confess that I do not have a deeper understanding of RSS.
Update: I want to add that it was technically not possible to deliver 980 pixel wide comics in the RSS feed before the last website update.
Update #2: Okay, I’ll leave it at 980 pixel which seems to be favored by most. No need for further comments at this point.
I like 980 pixels.
Honestly I don’t care, I tend not to read it in the RSS, just follow the link back to your page and read it there. So thumbnailed is fine by me.
I use RSS to read this comic but for whatever reason it hardly ever shows the image anyway–so I just click the link and read the comic. In short, don’t worry about it; go with whatever suits your work.
I would like the larger size. I like being able to use Google Reader to read all my comics in one place, rather than having to go to a website.
I love RSS, I will add comics to my RSS feed that I wouldn’t visit normally otherwise. With RSS, I can read easily double the number of sites per day 🙂 As for the size of the comic, it doesn’t matter to me, I just love your art and sense of humor! 🙂
FAR prefer the 980 pixel images in the feeds. 380 px left the text totally unreadable, and made it very difficult to zoom in to view the comic on my iPhone.
I like 980 pixels.
I only use “live bookmarks” – RSS links to the comic pages.
I’m a huge fan of the full-size strips in the RSS feed!
Either way is fine. I think the drop-of may be because people can read the whole comic in the RSS feed so there is no need to click the link.
definitely go for the bigger size, it is better to read the comic straight out of reader than following the link.
also, thanks for posting just the comics in reader, it is annoying when comics authors post an update in reader to tell you what they had for lunch
I like the smaller, because i just click on the link anyways because the bigger one won’t fit my screen properly in google reader
I like to read the strip in RSS in the current size (980px). As a recomendation,if you want to capitalize, you can put ads on the feed.
I just use My Yahoo to check the feed for updates then follow the link to the update on the site, so I never see the comic in the feed anyway. Wasn’t even aware you could get comics delivered that way.
I like 980px.
Thank you for the great job.
I’m with wyrmul, et al. Whatever size in the RSS feed is OK, as I click on the link to the actual page. Not having the comic in the RSS would be OK too, as it would let the RSS page load faster.
I normally read comics directly from the feed, so full-size is best for me. When a comic is half-size, I often see the punch line before I click the link to see the full-size version. The thumbnail is pointless, really. I really like to read all my comics on one rss page.
I find it strange the readership should drop that much so quickly, maybe it’s a technical issue or something unrelated to the rez….
still, one thing it might be … I don’t get RSS for my comics (a rough idea of how often they update and the first couple of letters in the firefox awesomebar does it for me), but if I did, they’d be joining my more text-based feeds that get read via Outlook. Which even on a 1280-wide screen doesn’t leave anything like 980 pixels of space for images, as it tries to cram 4 columns of different stuff in at once (some _text_ emails get crunched; it’s terrible on a lower rez display, but corporate policy – most of my feeds are traffic reports for the trip home from work 😉 – is cast in iron). If a reasonable amount of people are using something like outlook to do their feed reading, maybe they just had a glance at the thumbnail before and saw it was changed before going to the site. Now that it’s hogging their display (and downloading/cacheing a bigger picture file?) they’re going over to a system more like mine?
Is there a way you can offer a choice of delivery method, plaintext link, link with thumbnail, or full-rez strip? Or does that make things even more dreadfully complex?
Bigger is better.
But the technique is important, too. (see the first update) 😉