A great deal of my life relies on being online. Beyond your typical bill paying and wasting time on Facebook and reading webcomics and whatnot, pretty much everything that I’m paid for (and that I should be paid for!) involves working online. Which is great! I love the connectivity and immediacy of being online, as I imagine most regular readers of webcomics do. I also love that it allows me to work with people all over. Heck, the FreakSugar staff alone reaches from the Pacific Coast all the way to the Atlantic!
And while that does mean I can continue to keep up with everything when I’m travelling, the disruption in schedules can cause difficulties and access to specific resources may be more difficult. Which is to say that I’ve been on vacation for the past week and a half, and haven’t been able to keep up very well with many webcomics. I only had my phone for internet access, and many comics simply read poorly in that venue. Not impossible, certainly, but I really don’t feel like scrolling back and forth just to read a three-panel gag strip, much less a large page spread. Which means that, now that I’m back, I’ve got a huge virtual stack of unread webcomics piled up. Depending on how you read your comics, you might be making it more complicated to get caught up than is necessary.
If you only read a few webcomics, for example, and simply don’t look at any of them on your time off, it would be a relatively straightforward matter to go back in the comics’ archives and start reading from the date when you stopped. If you read all of your webcomics through an app, they usually identify automatically which ones you have or haven’t read and, here again, it would be fairly easy to pick up where you left off.
The more manual your reading process, however, the more difficult a position you’re likely to find yourself in. If you read your webcomics by going through a specific browser’s bookmarks, you might find yourself struggling to recall the domain names of every webcomic you read. Or if you normally wait to see the creator make note of their updates on social media, an unusual schedule on your end may mean you miss an update.
Ultimately, my suggestion here is to automate your webcomics viewing as much as possible. Whether that’s tapping into their RSS feed, or reading comics via an app, or sending a text to your phone when they Tweet an update, or whatever, the more you can streamline the notification process, the less likely you are to miss something. Just like how you might set up a subscription for a digital or paper comic in order to never miss an issue, establishing a process that doesn’t require you to remember where you left off in a webcomic can make catching up with them infinitely easier!