First, and this is mainly for those of your reading on your RSS feeds, I just wanted to note that I found a small cache of Silhouette Shirt Ninja T-shirts, and that they are available for sale. That… that is all.

Which brings me to RSS. Now, every now and again I get an e-mail from someone asking me to put up an RSS feed, to join the technological future, all that jazz. Which to me, is a bit baffling, since I HAVE an RSS feed. Anyone using Firefox can look up into the address bar and see the little RSS icon that points out that, yes, there is a feed here. Which begs the question – “Greg, why don’t you PUBLICIZE that thing?”

The main reason is one of pure economics. RSS is a fantastic technology, but the way it’s currently utilized on my site, it’s basically on par with the comic-stripping sites that used to scrape my comic and display it on the same page as a whole bunch of other sites. Basically, when you read my comic via RSS right now, it’s bypassing the advertising that makes life possible for me. (Though, honestly, with the economy the way it is, it’s not really doing THAT very well anyway) I’ve tried to work some ads in using my ad tools, but I can’t find any way to make my ad code work in an RSS feed. I know google has an AdSense for feeds project in beta right now, but closed betas don’t really help me much.

Essentially, the MOMENT I’m able to get some kind of ad (preferably one of those smallish block ads, because they’re unobtrusive while still having a decent CPM) into the RSS feed, I’ll but a nice big giant button at the top of my page proclaiming RSS the lord high king of the internet. And hell – if any of you have some insight into how I can make it work, (without resorting to static images inlined into the feed that would require daily maintenance…yeah, I thought of that.) I would welcome the insight. One thing I’m not is a programmer – I make a decent show of it, for the most part, but I’m far from what you would call “savvy”. Because, really – the reason I used to hate those comic scrapers is because nobody would read the rants below the comic. Well, with RSS, that’s not an issue any more – but it would be shooting myself in the foot to push it like crazy right now.

So, like I said… if I could figure out how to get ads into the feed, I’d publicize it. Well, many of you alterted me to the fact that feedburner.com has the ability to work adsense ads into the content, so – even though I haven’t exactly gotten it up to speed yet, you can switch your subscriptions over to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/reallifecomics/comic/ today. I’ll be trying to get the ads in there, but hey – it’s definitely a start. :)

And a quick aside – I know a lot of you let me know that I can just change the feed to being a link of the comic rather than the image itself. I know that, but I really dig the idea of the image being in the post… as long as I can still get my due from it. This way, I’ll be able to have my cake and eat it too.