This is a brief history of the changes my daily comics page has gone through. It's in chronological order, with the latest changes at the bottom of the page. I thought it might make good reading, describing the hoops I've jumped through to generate my comics page. It also reminds me of what I've done or changed since I don't have my Web pages under source control (yet?).
I put my daily comics page together so I could get my fix of comics with only a couple mouse clicks instead of having to deal with the overhead of loading each strip's home page. For a while it worked great ....
| 11/22/95 |
The week of November 22, 1995,
United Media changed the naming
scheme for their comic images from having the current comic called
todays_xxxxx.gif
to having a name that includes the date and a 4 digit pseudo-random number.
I was not happy. I modified this page
to link to each of the appropriate pages at United Media, but that
took soooooo long to pull up all the advertisements and gorp on each page,
it wasn't always worth the trouble.
|
| 03/07/96 |
The week of March 7, 1996, I finished hacking a script (combination of Unix
shell and Perl) and set it up as a cron job to parse the appropriate
United Media pages each night and create my inline comics page again.
I might someday put together a more elegant all-Perl solution,
but for now brute force is getting the job done.
|
| 03/11/96 |
There were some problems over the weekend of March 9, 1996 with the
automatic FTP timing out. I found a different FTP client that uses
passive mode instead of SOCKS to get through the firewall, but instead
of using that, I modified a Perl FTP library to support passive mode.
This brings me one step closer to an all-Perl solution.
|
| 04/11/96 |
Removed links to United Media for The Doctor Fun Page. As of
March 31, 1996, Doctor Fun is no longer associated with United Media.
|
| 04/18/96 |
Moved my Web pages from Duke University to
GeoCities because Duke finally
got wise to the fact that I'm neither a student nor an employee.
GeoCities offers
free
Web accounts (they do not offer Internet access, and
there's a 2MB space limit). I had to hack out another script to transfer
to GeoCities since they don't support passive mode FTP, but that's what I
like to do.
|
| 04/26/96 |
Signed up for a free counter service from Internet Audit Bureau(tm).
I went with IAB over
WebCounter(tm) because IAB seemed to either have or be promising more
of the information I'm interested in seeing. Plus, IAB has that
cool tick-mark graphic.
Also moved this history list to its own page because it was getting too big.
|
| 05/10/96 |
Had to re-hack the parsing of the Dilbert links because the format of
the pages changed.
I don't know if it's a permanent change, but the combinations of filters
that I'm using now should be a little more robust.
|
| 05/13/96 |
Made a few modifications to the parsing script to optimize and modularize
it. Added some rudimentary error checking because I'm tired of having to
re-run my comics script by hand some mornings when I get to work. I added
a check to see if there was an error and a loop to retry (currently set to
5 iterations at 30 second intervals).
|
| 05/28/96 |
Added a copy of my comics page on the internal Web at work
(with the access counter and link to GeoCities automatically stripped
off) since there continue to be occasional problems
with FTPing through the firewall. Sorry for those
of you that can't always get the updated pages from GeoCities.
|
| 06/07/96 |
Setup a
sed script
(slightly modified from the original)
to convert the script source to HTML and added a link to it from my comics
page in case anyone is interested in seeing the source code; it's ugly,
but (a) it works, and (2 ;) I like it.
|
| 06/10/96 |
Added error checking to leave off the link for last Sunday's color comic
if the parsing of the link failed. Added parsing to figure and print
the date of when last Sunday's comic appeared. Fixed a minor HTML nit
of the underlining for some links extending one character beyond the
text that was underlined.
|
| 06/20/96 |
Added inline image and links to John Zakour's Computtoon.
|
| 07/02/96 |
Added The Buckets ® comic strip from United Media.
|
| 08/09/96 |
Changed the inline image link for Computoon. Hopefully this will fix
the problem of the image not coming up consistently.
|
| 08/20/96 |
Added link to Philadelphia Online Comics. These curently include
Non Sequitor ©, Shoe ©, and Doonesbury ©. Also
broke the list of intrapage links into two lines because it was
wrapping annoyingly on my browser.
|
| 08/30/96 |
Removed link to Philadelphia Online Comics because they
changed their policy and now only allow paying subscribers
to access their daily comics (access is password protected).
Bummer.
|
| 10/07/96 |
Fixed link to The Buckets home page when the script couldn't parse
the page (it was incorrectly pointing at Robotman's home page).
|
| 10/10/96 |
Added Shoe and Pizza Bones to the page. Welcome to the group, guys!
|
| 10/14/96 |
Modified parsing of Shoe and Pizza Bones. It looks like each of these
sites puts up the next week's dailies on Sunday so if parse is running
on Sunday, put up the title graphic instead of the previous Friday/Saturday
daily. Some of the Shoe dailies have %20 embedded in the name of
the image source. Modified parsing to deal with this.
|
| 10/15/96 |
Pizza Bones daily page for Tuesday is misspelled tuedsay.html.
Hacked parse to take care of this special case. If this is something
that randomly changes, I'll have to implement a two level parse for
Pizza Bones.
|
| 10/16/96 |
Changed all the United Media daily HTML parsing to use the more robust
tr/grep/sed combination of filters rather than the grep/dd combination.
This allows for variable length filenames on the daily images (important
because United Media's random numbers are not always 4 digits).
|
| 10/17/96 |
Cleaned up a couple places in the code to make it more modular/reuse a
variable. With the syntax of sh, this actually makes it look more cryptic
to the casual observer, but that's part of the art of programming.
|
| 11/04/96 |
Almost every day for the last couple weeks, the parsing for the United Media
comics has been timing out. Changed the number of retries on an error from
5 to 10, and changed the cron job from running at 4am to running at 6am to
try to get around whatever the problem is. A more elegant solution would be
to have the parse script reschedule itself it there are errors. I'll think
about how to do that.
|
| 11/18/96 |
Changed the parsing of Pizza Bones to be a little more flexible. This
should take care of the fragments of names it's been parsing spitting out
recently.
|
| 11/23/96 |
Put up the banner for Shoe and Pizza Bones instead of a daily on Saturdays;
it looks like Shoe and Pizza Bones are updated on Saturday at some point
after my script parses their pages which results in images that won't load.
Updated script that automatically copies files to GeoCities to use their
new FTP procedures.
|
| 11/27/96 |
Added Tommy (TM) from United Media to the page. I noticed Tommy a few weeks
ago on United Media's site, and I've been following it to see if I liked it
enough to add to the page. I guess this answers the question.
|
| 12/09/96 |
United Media revamped their Web site, including the path to the daily images.
I've hacked in a fix so I can get the dailies correctly. I've removed the
parsing of the latest Sunday comics from United Media until I have the time
to figure out how they've changed. Also, the cool Dr. Fun image I was
referencing is gone from United Media's site. I'm looking for a good
replacement, but until I find one I'll use a boring image from SunSITE.
|
| 12/19/96 |
More churn at United Media. Sometime during
the last week they changed the path to their images again. (I think they
might actually have put them back to what they were, but I'm too lazy to
pull up my old code.) I've got it working again until the next turn of the
crank.
|
| 01/08/97 |
Fixed the address to the small GeoCities logo at the bottom of my comics
pages.
|
| 01/13/97 |
Changed the inline image for Doctor Fun and updated the address for
the Argon Zark banner image.
|
| 03/16/97 |
Changed all of the HTML fragments that I was cat'ing to create the comics
page into "here documents" within the parse script. Cleaned up the parse
script a little bit. Removed Tommy becuase I really don't find it very
funny. Removed the table I was using for the Doctor Fun links because
it wasn't consistent with the rest of the comics' links. Added parsing
of the latest United Media Sunday pages back to the script.
|
| 03/17/97 |
Fixed one change that I had missed with Show and Pizza Bones
that kept them from getting parsed correctly. Simplified the
parsing of the United Media dailies; now it will be fairly easy to
combine the parsing of the United Media dailies and Sunday's into
a single loop.
|
| 03/19/97 |
Added new sections for Helen: Sweetheart of the Internet and
Mother Goose and Grimm.
|
| 03/20/97 |
I moved the nightly cron job from a SunOS 4.x machine to a Solaris 2.x
(aka. SunOS 5.x) machine and have had to play stupid path games to get the
parse script to work the way I want it to. (Somebody explain to me why
the differnt SunOS versions don't pass the same environment to cron
jobs ... and while you're at it, explain to me why we all can't just
get along.)
|
| 03/24/97 |
Changed the link to GeoCities at the bottom of the pages. Had to modify one
of the scripts to deal with the different length of HTML source.
|
| 04/12/97 |
Added the "last updated" graphic from the Argon Zark! front page so I can
tell if Charley has added a new page without all the fuss of pulling up
the Argon Zark! page.
|
| 05/01/97 |
Added the last updated and next update dates for Helen. I'm currently
putting these in manually, but I might try to automate it in the future.
|
| 05/05/97 |
Added section and links for 10 Laughs A Day, including links to the two
cartoons that have changed that day.
|
| 05/11/97 |
The name of the Shoe title graphic changed. Added an extra <P>
tag at the end of 10 Laughs A Day section to be consistent with the rest
of the sections.
|
| 06/18/97 |
Stole^H^H^H^H^HBorrowed the table of which cartoons are updated on
which weekdays from the 10 Laughs A Day site. This makes it easier
to jump to a previous day that I missed or to see if they've updated
the day's cartoons, yet.
|
| 06/19/97 |
Added HEY, STUFF THIS!, a weekly MacBiased cartoon by Peter Steinfeld
that comes from http://www.macworks.com.
Also added On the Fastrack from King Features Syndicate (via IBM).
This one was interesting to automate because it requires a two step
parse to get the image name.
|
| 07/06/97 |
Hurray! Hellen has moved to weekly updates! New comics are available
every Monday. Changed the "last updated" line for Helen to report this
good news.
|
| 07/08/97 |
The Shoe pages were moved into a subdirectory off of Jeff MacNelly's
site. Added the subdirecorory to the base Shoe URL in the script
so the parsing will continue.
|
| 07/08/97 |
Added a Comics Sites section to the comics page. Reworded the Administrivia
section.
|
| 07/13/97 |
[Finally got aroung to doing some major work on the page ....]
The banner graphics for Shoe and Pizza Bones changed; updated the
script to use the correct one on Sunday when I don't
parse a daily image. Convered the history page to a table because
it looks spiffier. Added a
robots META tag to each of my comics pages to tell robots not to
index my pages. (Currently only a few robots support this tag,
but it can't hurt to have it there.) Added Kevin and Kell and the
Comics du Jour dailies -- Café Angst, Fisher, Ozone Patrol, and
USS Utopia -- to the page. Rearranged the order of a few of the comics
to group the dailies together.
|
| 07/14/97 |
Cleaned up the tables I use to better conform to the HTML spec. Replaced
the jump table to the top of the comics page with one that scales better
and grouped the intrapage links into categories.
|
| 07/25/97 |
Added a link to a Sunday color Kevin and Kell off of The Official Home
Tree of Kevin and Kell. Added a link to the Kevin and Kell strips from
recent weeks off of The Official Home Tree of Kevin and Kell and removed
the link to the
Master Index on the alternate site.
|
| 07/28/97 |
Fixed small bug in the error paths for Kevin and Kell and the
Comics du Jour strips .... all of them would report the URL for Shoe
along with the error message if they failed. Simplified the definition
lists that are used in the error paths. Couldn't contact
www.reuben.org this morning so I switched to the alternate
Kevin and Kell site for parsing the daily image. (Tom also tells me
that the alternate site updates it's daily image in a more timely
fashion than The Official Home Tree.)
|
| 08/06/97 |
Removed Café Angst since it is now
closed.
Removed Internet Audit Bureau(tm) counter because it rarely loads, and
lately it has just been a waste of time. Added Houston Chronicle's
Build Your Own Comics Page to the list of other sites on the Web.
And some minor changes: added an exclamation point at the end of
"Argon Zark!" intra-page link; had to change the script that copies
the pages to the internal Web to hack off 13 lines instead of 21 since
it used to be hacking off the Web counter HTML code; added an extra
blank line at the end of the comics page to be consistent with the
other pages.
|
| 08/08/97 |
Changed the script that copies the pages to the internal Web to add a
line at the bottom of the page saying the pages are mirrors of the ones
out in the Real World.
|
| 09/06/97 |
After a month's hiatus, I finally found the time to make a few changes and
updates to the comics page .... Finally decided to go live with the Perl
script I cobbled together to figure out the name of the daily Mother Goose
and Grimm images. Moved Mother Goose and Grimm to right after Pizza Bones
(so it would be with the rest of the dailies that are actually inline).
Removed Comuttoon because I
don't find it very funny, and the jokes are often ones I've already seen
on the 'net. Added a link for THE GIFTED to the "Comics Sites on the Web"
section. I'll eventually migrate this to it's own space after Argon Zark!
Added some comic-specific links to USS Utopia, Fisher and Kevin and Kell.
(Ozone Patrol doesn't have any interesting links.) Changed all mailto URLs
to send mail to my geocities.com address.
|
| 09/08/97 |
Added a link to the On the Fastrack archive. Fixed a bug in the code that
calls the script that figures out the daily Mother Goose and Grimm image.
Fixed the link for the Pizza Bones archive list. Fixed Shoe Sunday and
dailies links.
|
| 09/14/97 |
I had the wrong algorithm for the Mother Goose and Grimm Sunday image
names. Fixed the script that generates the daily Grimmy name to use the
correct Sunday name.
|
| 10/26/97 |
Made a few small tweaks to keep up with a change to the naming of the
Shoe daily pages and the home page graphic.
|
| 12/9/97 |
My comics page is now hosted on employees.org.
Added a link for a CGI that displays the true daily Dilbert comic.
(You know, the same one that's in the newspaper, not the one-week
delayed version that United Media makes publicly available.) Added
note about my script not being able to parse most of United Media's
comics since they revamped their site. Removed the construction
sign image from the footers of each page. Updated my e-mail address
to mbroome@employees.org.
|
| 12/13/97 |
Fixed the parsing of the United Media dailies. I am now doing a two-level
parse on those to find the daily image names. Removed the United Media
Sunday image parsing since there are no longer different pages for the
full color Sunday images. Changed Kevin & Kell parsing since the K&K
alternate site I was using has moved ... but there now a low-bandwidth
version of Kevin & Kell off the same site as the Official Home Tree.
|
| 12/14/97 |
Changed the image height and width specification for Sunday images from
United Media since the Sunday images are the larger full color images.
|
| 01/02/98 |
It's the new year, and what a better way to start it than to get my comics page
fixed up. The United Media comics have been broken since a day or two after I
last "fixed" them about a month ago. I've also removed the page with my script
source code. It was getting pretty ugly, and there are a number of inferior
scripts (in Perl) that get called that weren't shown. When I convert the whole
mess over to Perl -- Real Soon Now ... really ... trust me -- I might put it
back up. Until then, I'll consider
requests for the source code.
Removed HEY, STUFF THIS! because I find it only moderatley funny, and I've been
having trouble with the link recently. Temporarily changed Grimmy image from
trying to get the daily image name to using the image which is on the welcome
page of the Grimmy site. Minor cleanup of various text. Removed the header
comic names for comics that have the name in their images. Moved the block of
explanatory text from the top of the page to the Administrivia section.
Cleaned up the list of intrapage links at the top of the page.
Added additional links for Ozone Patrol pages.
|
| 01/06/98 |
Took out the hack for parsing the misspelled "Tuedsay.html" page for
Pizza Bones' Tuesday page. Looks like they've finally fixed the spelling.
|
| 03/09/98 |
Fixed height and width tags for Grimmy image. Added parsing of
Calvin and Hobbes reruns from Universal Press Syndicate Comics.
|
| 04/02/98 |
Fixed the parsing of On The Fastrack from IBM's OtherVoices pages.
I finally to the time to delve into IBM's pages and figured out the
changes they made.
|
| 04/14/98 |
Removed Mother Goose and Grimm from the inline images. The image I've
been pulling in for a while keeps changing size, and I don't feel like
dealing with it any more. If I can figure out a good way to parse the
daily comics, I might bring the strip back to inline status, but for now
I've just added it as a link to my "Comics Sites on the Web" section.
Added links for CTOONS and Space Moose to my "Comics Sites on the Web"
section. Added logging of accesses to the page (both from employees.org
and from cisco people page) so I can see how much activity there is.
|
| 04/30/98 |
Added Sluggy Freelance. It's a very nice, idependent daily comic.
Thanks to Tom for pointing it out to me (and giving me a nudge to add
it to the comics page :).
|
| 05/07/98 |
Fixed Kevin and Kell parsing .... the low-bandwidth site has moved to a
new location, and I was still trying to grub the image name from the
old location that's no longer there.
10 Laughs a Day has gotten its own domain name. Changed all the links
to point to the new site. Added a link to King Features Syndicate's
comics site to the Comics Sites on the Web section.
|
| 06/19/98 |
I've been busy and haven't had the time to tweak my comics script
so lots of stuff has broken because sites have moved or strips have
gone away. The changes in this update are
|
| 06/20/98 |
Fixed minor bug with the building of the URL for the Show title
page graphic to use on the weekends. Changed Shoe parsing to
put up an actual comic on Saturday rather than the title page graphic.
(Still using just the graphic on Sunday, though.)
|
| 06/21/98 |
Fixed the WIDTH and HEIGHT tags for the Sunday versions of
Calvin and Hobbes and Sherman's Lagoon; I was always using the
(small) daily image size, but these strips have large color
images on Sunday.
Changed the parsing of Sluggy Freelance on Sundays to just display
the title page graphic because the Sunday color strip is made up
of multiple smaller images, and I don't feel like doing the work to
parse them.
|
| 07/13/98 |
Removed Fisher because it hasn't been updated in weeks. (I'm assuming
it's dead.)
|
| 07/14/98 |
Added Toonville to the list of Comics Sites. Toonville seems to be a
launch site to a bunch of independent cartoons, many (most? all?) of which
have their own or at least different domains.
|
| 07/28/98 |
Fixed parsing of Calvin and Hobbes. There is now a site
www.calvinandhobbes.com
that refers back to UExpress' Calvin and Hobbes daily page, but the images
are now being referenced from that domain. Added grokking of the dates
of the last update (aka. current strip week posting date) and next update
of Helen. These dates are being pulled from the current update page.
The dates are in two differnt formats, but I'll live with that (for now).
|
| 09/22/98 |
Removed Doctor Fun section because as of September 3, 1998, the
posting of new Doctor Fun cartoons is suspended indefinitely.
(See The Doctor Fun Page
for an explanation.)
Minor tweak to Calvin and Hobbes plumbing to make sure I end up with
the right URL.
Added parsing of User Friendly, a cool and geeky daily strip.
|
| 09/24/98 |
Added Doonesbury from UExpress. Changed the fence-fencepost ordering
of the veritical bars that separate the links at the top of the page,
and added non-breakable spaces so that a line will never begin with
a vertical bar. (It make the HTML uglier but the output prettier --
and probably noboby but me cares.)
|
| 10/05/98 |
Fixed parsing User Friendly -- the name of the image changed from what
I had originally grokked. If it's going to be changing occasionally or
regularly, I'll have to re-tool the parsing. I'll wait and see.
Fixed Sluggy Freelance -- the comics images moved the "images" directory
to the "comics" directory.
Added a link to Tanner's
Favorite Comics Links in my Comics Sites on the Web section.
|
| 10/07/98 |
Looks like Committed has changed from a 300x399 image size to a
600x238 image size. I wonder if it's a permanent switch? Changing
my script to use 600x238. If it bounces between the two formats,
I'll have to either drop the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes or figure
them out offline.
|
| 10/13/98 |
This week Committed changed back to a 300x414 image size so I guess
it wasn't a permanent switch. Since I don't feel like writing the
glue logic to pull in the image, run it through ImageMagik and parse
the image size, I'm just removing the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes for
now. I hate to do that since it breaks one of the original goals of
my page, but it's the most expedient solution for now.
|
| 11/5/98 |
Fixed parsing of User Friendly. This month they changed the numbering
scheme on the images so it's no longer based on the date (or if it is,
it's not obvious). So now I parse the day's page and harvest the image
name. Also added archving of a weeks' worth of pages and a link bar to
the archived pages. (Tanner does this on his page, and Neal Atlow requested
this feature.)
|
| 11/7/98 |
Fixed the parsing of On the Fastrack. Changed format af weekly rotating
archive page links to better match the other links at the top of the page.
|
| 11/15/98 |
Added a link to the Sluggy Freelance FAQ.
|
| 12/1/98 |
Fixed parsing of User Friendly. Iliad restructured the site and the
URL path names changed slightly. Also removed the "real Today's Dilbert"
link since that CGI hack has been broken for a while.
|
| 12/3/98 |
Doonesbury page and URL path names changed slightly. Fixed my script
to grok the correct info. Switched from using url_get Perl script
for getting page source to using lynx -source since it handles
more pages and error conditions better.
|
| 1/22/99 |
Changed the HEIGHT and WIDTH for the On The Fastrack image and the
Kevin and Kell image. These changed sometime in the last few weeks,
but I'm just getting around to fixing it. (It looks like the images are
the same aspect ratio but now with some extra whitespace around the images.)
|
| 3/24/99 |
Finally got around to removing On The Fastrack. It hasn't updated in
many weeks (months?), and IBM has reorganized their pages. The link
for http://www.ibm.com/OtherVoices/Index/ now goes to
http://www.ibm.com/industrytalk/ which doesn't have any reference to
On The Fastrack. It might be available somewhere else on the 'net.
If I get the time, I might try hunting for it.
|
| 8/17/99 |
Well, it took me 5 months to do it, but I've finally gotten off my duff
to do a little maintenence to the comics page. There's been a lot of
bit rot since the last time, and 3 of the comics parsings have broken:
Helen, 10 Laughs A Day, and User Friendly. Helen took a vacation for
the summer but is back now with the site redesigned and using Javascript.
10 Laughs A Day is gone for good so I'm removing it.
User Friendly parsing just needed a little tweaking.
|
| 8/31/99 |
Removed HEIGHT and WIDTH tags from Sluggy Freelance images since they
are no longer consistently the same size and have been getting stretched
out of shape.
|
| 9/7/99 |
Changed the banner image for Helen to a larger one that Peter Zale has
on his site.
|
| 12/16/99 |
Removed no-longer-valid (aka. broken) Sluggy Freelance archive links.
Just poked around on the Sluggy Freelance site, and I can't find a
replacement for the weekly or overall archive pages. Pete now has a
clickable calendar and a drop-down menu on the front page to select past
comics. I guess you have to go there if you want to spelunk in the
archives.
|
| 2/8/00 |
Removed Robotman. I finally got fed up with reading it every day and
admitted to myslef that it's just not funny. So I made it go away, and
I'm happier because of it.
|
| 3/19/00 |
Added Liberty Meadows at the request of the masses. (Plus I read
through the archives at comics.com, and it looks pretty cool.)
|
| 4/28/00 |
Added Doctor Fun back to the lineup. Hurray! I just happened to stumble
across a link to it and found that it's back on the Web at Metalab. This
time I have the daily image inline on the page since I'm no longer as
worried about bandwidth and page loading time.
|
| 11/1/00 |
A few sites recently changed their URLs: UnitedMedia changed the
specific comics pages from ab.html to index.html; Argon Zark moved to
www.zark.com; Doonesbury URL added "strip/" at the beginning of the
dailydose page path, and the image itself now comes from akamai.net;
names of Sluggy images aren't consistent day-to-day so parse them from
the site rather than generate them myself.
|
| 11/6/00 |
Liberty Meadows home page within UnitedMedia has changed from having
"comics" in the URL to having "creators". Don't know why.
|
| 11/27/00 |
Added week-at-a-glance link for Sluggy. Had to switch to using GNU version
of date command in order to support "last Monday" and "Monday a week ago"
date specifications. Calvin and Hobbes web paged moved; updated script to
match.
|
| 1/19/01 |
Added daily Helen comics back in thanks to my girlfriend, Lisa, figuring
out the daily image naming scheme. Helen is now at
www.comicspage.com rather than www.peterzale.com.
Moved Helen section back above Dr. Fun.
|
| 2/10/01 |
Fixed grokking the image name of the Kevin and Kell daily image.
|
| 6/18/01 |
Updated parsing of Sluggy since the site has moved to using PHP.
Fixed and removed some dead links.
|
| 10/10/01 |
Fixed image size for Helen. Added missing intra-page link for
Doctor Fun. |
| 11/10/01 |
Removed access logger CGI from behind the return-to-home-page icon
since I wasn't looking at the access log, and the log was taking up
too much space.
|
| 1/11/02 |
Removed Liberty Meadows because the author, Frank Cho, suspended newspaper
publication of the strip on 12/31/01. It seems he got tired of five years of
fighting with newspaper editors (and if you look at the Uncensored Strips section of libertymeadows.com you'll see why), and
he's taking his show to comic books instead.
|
| 5/22/02 |
Fixed parsing of Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet and switched to
http://www.ucomics.com/helen/ for the source of the Helen
dailies since it's easier to parse. Added Pearls Before Swine since
there was a request for it.
|
| 10/4/02 |
Fixed parsing of User Friendly. I've been too busy to keep up with
reading the comics, and nobody mentioned to me that UF had not been parsing
for the last week or so. Had to tweak the script to handle the new
dynamic daily pages for UF.
|
| 11/18/02 |
Checked Argon Zark and found that the pages are being updated even though
the image I'm linking in still says last update October 1, 2001. Obviously,
Charley stopped updating and using that image. Sigh. Changed the script
to scrape the last updated date from the text on the www.zark.com
home page.
|
| 1/26/03 |
Fixed parsing of Helen Sunday image.
Fixed size of Kevin and Kell Sunday image.
Fixed link to archive for Sherman's Lagoon.
|
| 7/8/03 |
Fixed parsing of Kevin and Kell images: there is now an extra "gifs/" in the
URL path.
|
| 7/24/03 |
Argon Zark had an update and Charley changed the last updated info on the
home page from text back to an image. Changed my parse script to handle
either one (I think). Fixed Kevin and Kell weekly link. (The page suffix
is now "phtml".)
|
| 11/28/03 |
Added parsing of
Get Fuzzy
from United Media.
Charley changed the initial page for Argon Zark from an image to a Flash
animation that has the last updated date built-in. So, AFAIK, there's not
way for me to extract the date and display it. (And I don't want to pull
in the entire Flash animation. So for now, there's no info about Argon Zark
updates.
|
| 1/22/04 |
Sometime this month, the User Friendly images that I've been parsing have
become images of Cthulhu saying
Hello. Perhaps you would be so kind as to go read the FREE strip at userfriendly.org. WHat you're doing is hurtin UF's ability to make money so it can stay alive. Which means I get less money in my contract which mean I'll come eat your squinchy little head ...That's cute, and I don't mind clicking through when that happens. But I also think I figured out how to get around it. |
| 3/19/04 |
Removed Pearls Before Swine because I haven't found it to be funny for
quite some time, and I had another user tell me the same thing.
|
| 5/11/04 |
Changed HEIGHT and WIDTH tags on daily Doonesbury so the comic isn't getting
sqaushed anymore.
|
Last Updated: Tuesday, May 11, 2004
mbroome (at) employees (dot) org