Something better to do » Comics Aggregator

“That’s Life” comic fixed in aggregator

jik — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:30:00 +0000

I’ve fixed the comic “That’s Life”, which was broken in my comics aggregator.

Comics added to aggregator

jik — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:17:24 +0000

By popular demand (i.e., somebody asked), the following comics have been added to my comics aggregator:

Banana Triangle
Birdbrains
Dog Eat Doug
F Minus
Ink Pen
Luann
The Other Coast
Overboard
Pluggers
Rubes
Scary Gary
Strange Brew

Enjoy!

P.S. If you find the aggregator useful, please consider making a donation. Thanks!

UPDATED: “Basic Instructions” added to comics aggregator

jik — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:42:10 +0000

I’ve added “Basic Instructions” to my comics aggregator. Tip of that hat to Seth Gordon for pointing me at this fine comic!

UPDATE: Because the author of “Basic Instructions” sometimes publishes his strip after people have already read their daily comics, I’ve also added “Basic Instructions (1-day delay)”, so you can use that one instead if you want to be sure not to miss one!

GoComics.com changed their Web page format again

jik — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:39:27 +0000

GoComics.com changed their Web page format and broke my screen scraper again last night. I’ve updated my comics aggregator to support the new page format as of this morning.

comics.com has merged into gocomics.com

jik — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:01:17 +0000

For those who use my comics aggregator, note that as of yesterday, the comics.com web site has merged into gocomics.com. I’ve just updated the aggregator to reflect this. The comic strip “That’s Life” appears to have been lost in the shuffle; I’ll check again at some point in the future to see if it resurfaces so I can put it back. All other comics are intact.

I’ve also fixed Mother Goose & Grimm, which stopped working at some point in the past and I just noticed today.

As always, please let me know if you want me to add a comic to the line-up.

Enjoy!

9 chickweed Lane, Brewster Rockit, Frazz added to comics aggregator

jik — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:25:36 +0000

For those of you who use my comics aggregator, please note that in response to user requests, I’ve added 9 Chickweed Lane, Brewster Rockit, and Frazz to it. As always, please email me if there are any comics you’d like me to add.

Comics aggregator now supports short links

jik — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 20:45:48 +0000

For those of you who use my comics aggregator, there’s now a “get short link” button at the bottom you can use to get a Bitly link for the comics page you’re currently viewing. So you can build up exactly the configuration you want in terms of which comics you want to see, and then generate a short link for it for bookmarking etc. Enjoy!

“Not Invented Here” added to comics aggregator

jik — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:57:09 +0000

I’ve added Not Invented Here to my comics aggregator. Enjoy!

GoComics fixed in comics aggregator

jik — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:43:19 +0000

For those of you who use my comics aggregator, please note that the charming folks at GoComics.com mucked with their site again, possibly to make aggregators like mine more difficult to implement (they want your eyeballs and your clicks on their ads!), and I’ve just fixed the aggregator to compensate for their changes, so their strips should be visible again in it.

The strips I currently have in the aggregator that are impacted by this are:

Adam&Home
Baldo
Big Top
The Boondocks
Brenda Starr
Cathy
Close to Home
Doonesbury
The Duplex
For Better or for Worse,
FoxTrot,
Fred Basset
The Fusco Brothers
Garfield
Heart of the City
Lio
Lucky Cow
Non Sequitur
Stone Soup
Sylvia
Tank McNamara

It’s quite easy for me to add new strips from this site (or most any other), so if you don’t see something you want, just let me know.

I’ve also fixed the aggregator so that when it alphabetizes the list of comics, it ignores “a”, “an” and “the”, so that, for example, “The Duplex” now appears under “D” instead of “T”.

(For those who are interested in the gory details, they’ve made their image URLs dynamic, such that you now have to actually fetch the page for the comic and parse it to get the image URL, and they’ve made that difficult to do by blocking requests from unrecognized user agents, and I mean totally blocking, i.e., not even acknowledging the TCP connection.)

height of comics.com single-panels now limited automatically

jik — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:57:30 +0000

For users of my comics aggregator…

When comics.com switched to their redesigned Web site, they started exporting much larger versions of their single-panel comics. This is annoying, so I’ve fixed the aggregator to notice comics from comics.com taller than 400 pixels and restrict their display height to 400 pixels.

So for example, whereas before you would have seen this:

Now you will see this:

Enjoy!