After a decade+ out of comic books, I returned to reading them on a regular basis again 2 years ago. At first I hit the titles I was familiar with, but within the last year I have branched out into the independents as well. It is amazing what is offered now on a weekly basis. Literally hundreds of titles come every wednesday. As a coding exercise outside of my normal realm and to keep up to speed on what was coming out I built the comic release list that is listed in the bar under the site title. to build it I put together series of web pages that would retrieve the list automatically from diamond publishing, reformat and order the entries and list the contents on a user friendly page. it worked, but it required some amount of manual work to maintain.

Once I had a working list I was looking to release it to a wider audience. I started using iGoogle six month ago and I like the gadgets so I began to build a new release schedule. However I was looking to expand the listing to cover all comic books, toys and magazine. At this point I was also using Midtown comics for my weekly comic fix. I didn't receive the titles the day they came out, but the convience and prices were better than my local shop could provide. The delivery service is also amazing well done. In 2+ years of weekly deliveries, Midtown has only made 2 mistakes, but corrected without any fuss. After finding a contact at Midtown I was allowed to leverage their list to use as a basis for a new release schedule gadget and the results are in the sidebar. I want to go into my details on the iGoogle gadget building process as well as the experiences I have had with midtown comics.