Have you ever discovered a cool webcomic, blog, youtube channel, etc., and wanted to read it from the beginning? Noticed that there isn’t really a good way to do that?
RSS feeds are great for keeping up to date with something, but (as far as I know), there’s no way to ‘go back to the beginning’, unless the site is specifically designed to allow it. Of course, you can just read a few then bookmark where you left off in your browser (or ‘favorite’ it if you’re using IE), but then every time you read a few more, you have to manually update the bookmark.
I was thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way – a Firefox extension maybe – to create dynamic bookmarks, which automatically updates to the last page you were on?
So you’d open up the bookmark, read a few comics, blog posts, etc., and it would automatically be updated to the last page you viewed before you moved on to another site or closed the browser tab. Next time you open that bookmark, you could just pick up where you left off.
If you know of something like this that already exists, please let me know about it in the comments! And if you have experience with browser extensions and would like to create it, I would be happy to promote it on the links page at SearchTempest.com!
I’ve just had the very same idea. As I even thought of the same name as you did – “Dynamic Bookmarks” – I found your post very quickly.
This is not only useful for webcomics, but for any kinds of article series, multi-part tutorials, picture albums, reviews of episodes that you read along while watching the series step by step, or the same for novel series …
I was actually going to add this as a feature request to Mozilla’s bugtracker, but in our current intellectual property-obsessed world, I never know whether I’m going to be accused of “stealing” someone’s idea, so I’d hereby like to tell you first. Would you create a feature request on that bugtracker, or may I do so?
By all means, please do! Even better, feel free to make a firefox add-on for it. 🙂
I have had the same thought! As a webdesigner I make sure to put a link to the first post as a favorite on my clients blog/sites.
If the site is done in WordPress and they have the archives widget activated, it makes it easier. But alot of times it’s not.
That is also one of the reasons I LOVE the FB timeline. It makes going back and reading and catching up with someone sooo much easier.
Well, I found something kind of like what I was envisioning. It’s called Hilarious Webcomic Manager: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hilarious-webcomic-manager/
It doesn’t integrate with bookmarks or update automatically, but it’s still a lot better than nothing.