About Tapestry
The original version of Tapestry first launched on June 7, 2003, offering feeds for Dilbert and PvP in the first instance. It came about because I was just starting to get into the whole RSS/Feed thing, after I had been convinced to start a blog.
Once I started using a feedreader, it became apparent that a good way to read comics would be via RSS, so I started looking around for any feeds, and found one for Dilbert which was hosted at LiveJournal. Problem was, it didn't seem to have been updated for several months.
So, in an effort to learn the Python programming language, I set about writing some scrapers which output RSS feeds for the comics. One important difference to the feeds I generated compared to the one I'd found was that I included several days worth of comics, not just the latest one. The reason for this is that I didn't want to miss any issues of comics if I happened to be away on business or holiday.
The popularity of the feeds astounded me (Dilbert is by far and away the most popular), and I've received plenty of props from the blogosphere about it all, which obviously pleases me.
Anyway, I've been meaning to get around to rewriting the whole system to become more of a directory for comic feeds, as over the last 18 months many comics have added their own feeds (which was one of my goals of the original project). And here it is.
Everything has been rewritten in Ruby, my new language of choice, on top of the quite fantabulous Rails web application framework. In case you were unaware, Rails makes building this kind of web application ridiculously easy. My virtual hat goes off to David Heinemeier Hansson and everyone else involved in producing what is quite possibly the only piece of software that makes me laugh out loud at how easy it is to make things happen. In short, it just works.
If you are interested, you can read the timeline of the whole project via my
blog.
You can also steal this button: 