No, but you can configure it (and I do) to not just link to the images but to download them locally, and keep N days worth around. (The “previous day” link on mine will work for nine days, IIRC.)

And isn’t re-publishing the strips on the Internet risky?

Shouldn’t be. In any case, mine is up there for me only anyhow; if they complain, I throw .htaccess up and it still works as expected.

I figure it’s no different than reading them at the SF Gate or Washington Post’s website but not actually buying the Gate or the Post. :-)

Mine looks like this.

A page a day? Hmm. Can you also see several days’ worth of one comic at once, e.g. if you don’t watch for a while and want to see the story line?

(And isn’t re-publishing the strips on the Internet risky?)

1. they typically only update once a day, not a bunch of times like news sites, and
2. you typically don’t watch that many different cartoon sites, so the interleaving isn’t that much of a problem.

On the other hand, then you have problems with feeds breaking or being taken offline since they don’t generate ad revenue. Which is understandable but slightly annoying once you’ve got used to getting your entire cartoon fix in one place.

(Not to mention wonky screen-scrapers that only fetch one panel of multi-panel [e.g. Sunday] cartoons, so you end up having to visit the site anyway…)

I read perhaps 12.

I dropped it.

I am now using an RSS reader as much as my browser. I have not tried the one in Firebird (in fact, I didn’t even realize there was one), but that screenshot seems like it is missing something. I see sites, headlines, and the rendered pages, but not the content-within-RSS stuff. Personally, I use NewNewsWire (screenshot of normal view, screenshot of inline view that some like, but I find annoying). Clicking on a title in the upper-right quadrant (or arrowing to it…it is pretty keyboard friendly) displays the RSS feed content. Double clicking on a title in the upper-right quadrant (or hitting enter after arrowing to it) launches the specific article’s URL in my browser. Double clicking on the name of the site in the left quadrant (or via keyboarding) opens the site’s front page in my browser.

Yes, I do miss out on several things when looking at the RSS overview like this. Many sites have full articles with links (and sometimes even images) published in their RSS feeds. Many others print the first few sentences. Some simply have article titles, so you have to click over to the site anyway. The RSS specification has fields for things like the number of comments and the URL for viewing all comments or posting a comment. Unfortunately, few sites publish this data and even fewer readers will display it if it’s there.

Overall, I am really happy with this particular newsreader (I am sure there are others with a similar featureset/interface for Unix, Windows, etc). My happiness with using the feeds out there with a good reader ranges from “mildly annoyed” to “extremely happy.”

The second thing you describe sounds like mod_roaming, which I loved in Netscape 4.