jsmunroe wrote: Bigger is better.

But the technique is important, too. (see the first update)

Bigger is better.

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?

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’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.