Each comic in Webcomix is periodically checked for updates, so if like me you keep tabs on several different web-comics that all update at different intervals then Webcomix will save you from having to remember to refresh half a dozen different websites at various times just to keep up to date. Simply visit your Webcomix dashboard and you’re set!

Underneath the covers there’s a fair bit that I’m proud of with this app. First off the entire system is designed to be as lightweight and efficient (in terms of server compute-time and bandwidth) as reasonably possible. Virtually all of the actual work is handled by the client-side JavaScript. The handful of tasks that must be performed server-side are optimized with the help of a custom caching layer which ensures that any given computation (or fetch of an external resource) only needs to be performed once. There is also an additional caching layer in the client used to prevent it from making any given request to the server more than once per session.

The server itself is client-agnostic and provides a simple JSON-based API, meaning that while the initial incarnation of Webcomix is in the form of a web-app it should be just as easy to package the same functionality in a mobile, desktop, or other flavor of application. But that’s a project for another day.

Anyhow, please note that Webcomix should be considered to be beta software at the moment. So if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for new features or improved functionality then please don’t hesitate to say so in the comments section.

Also, the list of comics currently available in Webcomix is not set in stone and is only based upon my personal preferences at the moment. Webcomix is designed in a way that makes adding additional comics a trivial task, so if your favorite comic is currently not in the list then I encourage you to post a request in the comments section so that I can add it.

Lastly, if anyone has any good ideas for how to extend the comic selection UI to handle a large number of comics that they’d like to share, then please do. The current interface with its basic rows of checkboxes is obviously not sufficient for handling hundreds (or even dozens) of comics. It needs to be replaced with something better (or at least, collapsible) soon.

Homegroups allow for much simplified sharing of multimedia and other content between computers on a network. There is very little explicit configuration needed, and when an application integrates with the Homegroup properly there is really no noticeable difference between a local resource and one that’s being streamed from some other computer on the Homegroup. This makes for a very cool experience when it all works, and in Windows Media Player it works seemlessly. My media library can be distributed across several systems, and yet from each one I can access the entire volume as if it is all local to that particular machine. And it just works, flawlessly, with no onerous setup or manual cajoling needed on my part. This is what good software is supposed to do; merge invisibly into the background so that the user can accomplish a complex task as if by magic, and currently only Windows Media Player does it.

I’m sure that situation will change in the near future, but at the moment its seamless Homegroup integration makes Windows Media Player the only media player that I am interested in using. And that means that some of its other shortcomings, such as a complete lack of support for a variety of free and open codecs and file formats, need to be dealt with. Now there are a number of tutorials on this subject already, but many of them give inaccurate or incomplete information. In the interest of having a complete set of instructions that actually work, if you want to enable FLAC/Vorbis/etc. support in Windows Media Player, do the following:

1. Install the DirectShow filters/codecs.
2. Install the Tag Support plugin.
3. OPTIONAL: If, like me, you included your FLAC folders/files in your library before installing the above packages, then you also need to rebuild your Windows Media Player library. Make sure you close Windows Media Player and shut down its network sharing service either by stopping it under ‘Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services‘ or by killing the ‘wmpnetwk.exe‘ process in the Task Manager before attempting to delete or rename its configuration folder.

And that’s really all there is to it. You may or may not end up with the ability to seek within and/or see the duration of FLAC files. I’ve seen it happen both ways on occasion, it seems like it either works or not depending upon the mood that Windows Media Player happens to be in when these plugins are installed. But the important bit is that all the previously unsupported files will now show up correctly in your library, and also (of course) that they are now playable.

And in other news, the rebuilding continues, slowly.