Sorry about all these posts about kwakk.info in a row — but as usual, after releasing a project, I find myself poking at it way more than before I released it, and I keep finding things to tweak. It’s classic — I always think something is feature complete, every day, and then the next day I find something else to fix/add/etc.
But I thought I should mention this one, because it’s a slightly breaking change.
Before:
After:
See? Some of the magazines I’ve added recently had double page scans, and they don’t really fit into the kwakk.info template: They get shrunken too much (even when clicking on the page to magnify)… and it’s even worse on cell phones. So I scripted something to split double pages into single pages, and re-ran it through the OCR and indexer and gah.
Anyway, the slightly breaking change is that if you have an explicit link like https://kwakk.info/ci/?search=spiegelman&index=CI-070-082, then that link will now probably point to a different page than before. Affected magazines are Comics Interview and Comics Feature, and to some degrees also Marvel Age and Wizard; the rest haven’t been touched.
The URLs should be stable from now on, though. *cough*
Anyway, I was wondering whether there are any further mags that are worth adding… There’s the Comics Buyer’s Guide, of course, with over 1000 issues, but that doesn’t seem to be available anyway. But it would be a valuable resource, just because it was around for so long. Anybody got a collection?
I had a peek in my shortbox of “non comics mags”, and I found…
There’s apparently 17 issues of this magazine — Indy: The Source For Independent Comics Coverage. I’ve only got a couple of issues, and there doesn’t seem to be any collections up for grabs at ebay.
I’ve got all issues of Altcomics Magazine, but I think that’s too recent to add to something like kwakk.info — and you can still get all issues from 2d cloud.
Crash: The Quarterly Comic Book Review was something that Drawn & Quarterly tried to get running, but they apparently only got two issues out. (Apparently Chris Ware was to do the cover of the third issue.) I’ve only got the first issue.
I’m guessing the Comics Comics material is up at their web site? So probably not worth adding.
Comics F/X: The Comics Fandom Examiner was apparently published by Mu Press? I’ve only got one issue, which is tabloid size, but it seems to have fluctuated in size, and there were apparently 20 issues. Might be worth adding if somebody has a collection and a scanner.
And… that’s all I’ve got. I’m probably forgetting some mags, but googling for “magazines about comics” is pretty futile. Oh, I should have realised that there’d be a Wikipedia page about this. Hm… Rocket’s Blast Comicollector sounds interesting…
Oh, and The Comics Reader seems even more interesting, and that’s been scanned already… and looks like it’s downloadable? Yup! Coming To A Web Site Mentioned Here Soon!
But now kwakk.info is feature complete for sure!