Philosophical Friday: Bring Back DailyINK!

King Features Syndicate publishes their comics online through the website Comics Kingdom. It's one of the two places I read the comics I talk about here (the other being Universal Uclick's GoComics). But before Comics Kingdom, King Features had a site called DailyINK, and it was about a billion times better.

I should point out, when they changed the site they added a bunch of stuff that I really like. They started putting up higher resolution images and expanded the archives so you can see older strips, and they added a bunch of vintage strips, which is nice. So it's not all bad.

But the biggest change for me, on a day-to-day basis, is that everything now takes much longer to load. The way Comics Kingdom works is that all your subscribed comics appear on a single page. And even though it won't display them at full size until you click them, it loads the full-size images anyway. I read a lot of comics, so I basically have to start the page loading and then go and do something else for a while to give it time to load.

That would be an inconvenience, but not a major one. What really annoys me is the fact that even a single strip now takes around 15 seconds to load. It may not sound like much, but it feels like a while when you're just sitting there waiting for it, and if you're trying to read through archived strips then it really adds up.

This ends up meaning that even though you've paid for access to their archives, browsing them is such a hassle that I doubt many people make much use of it. By comparison, the archives on DailyINK didn't go back as far, but strips loaded almost instantly, so you could easily read through old comics.

The other change that makes the archives less useful is the fact that the images are now accessed in a different way. It used to be that you could enter the image URL to go directly to it, and they were named in a straight-forward manner. If today's Spider-Man strip was tas20140530.gif then you knew that yesterday's would be tas20140529.gif, so you could actually write your own scripts to grab a whole lot of comics all at once to read offline. The actual URL I get for today's Spider-Man strip now is http://safr.kingfeatures.com/idn/ck3/content.php?file=aHR0cDovL3NhZnIua2luZ2ZlYXR1cmVzLmNvbS9UaGVBbWF6aW5nU3BpZGVybWFuLzIwMTQvMDUvU3BpZGVybWFuLjIwMTQwNTMwXzE0NDAuZ2lm which is obviously not supposed to mean anything to a human reading it and gives no hint of what the previous one would be. I don't even know if that URL would work for anyone else or if it's unique to me.

I've contacted King Features about this issue, and here's what they told me:

We've had a few complaints about speed compared with the previous site, but there's definitely a lot more going on. For example, the new site is responsive and is built with mobile devices in mind. That comes at a price.

Thanks for the feedback.

So it doesn't look like they intend to do anything about this at all. Apparently whatever back-end improvements they feel they've made to the site are worth the fact that the whole thing is worse than the previous version from the perspective of people trying to use it. Still, if you have a Comics Kingdom subscription then I encourage you to complain about the site, because if enough people do then maybe they might eventually feel it worthwhile to do something.