I'm always looking for a better way to read webcomics, and I've found a new one. The site is called Piperka (Bulgarian for paprika), for no discernable reason, and it's a web comic bookmarker. That is to say, you create a free account and pick the comics off the list of the ones that it monitors that you wish to subscribe to. (If one you read isn't on the list, you can use a webform to request that Kari Pahula, the site's owner, add it. So far this happens very quickly.) You can then visit the updates page and see which of your comics have updated recently and how many updates you've missed. Click on the link and you go to the comic's page--Piperka doesn't copy content, it just links to it.
If that was all there was to it, there wouldn't me much difference between Piperka and just, say, using an RSS reader. Well, besides the fact that Piperka doesn't need the site to have an RSS feed. The brilliant bit, though, is that Piperka lets you bookmark a site partway through its archive by entering the url of the page you last read, and it keeps track of unread from that point on. In fact, it goes that one better and provides a bookmarklet (a snippet of javascript you can make into a bookmark in your toolbar) that when you click on it will update the bookmark on Piperka so that next time you visit the updates page, it counts from the new position.
Up 'til now I've been using Bloglines to keep track of comics updates (and RSSPect to add RSS feeds to the comics that don't have them), but I've had to keep track of archives I've been partway through by keeping seperate bookmarks and adding new ones to mark my new position (and cleaning out the old ones by hand). In addition, RSSPect is pretty good for what it does, but there are some pages that it seems to have trouble detecting changes on (I suspect that they use the same name for the current comic, only changing the name when it moves into the archive, which fools RSSPect into thinking nothing has changed on the page it's watching), and others that change much more frequently than the comic actually changes. Piperka doesn't seem to have these problems (I'm not sure, but I suspect it's looking for the archive to grow a new page as its indicator that a comic has been added), and I'm totally in love with being able to work my way through an archive a few at a time and just supplanting my old bookmark with a press of a button. I also appreciate that I can have dozens of archives that I've marked and I don't have to worry about creating a huge unwieldy menu or having to organize them into seperate folders.
From now on, it looks like I'm using Piperka.
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