The folks at the King Features Syndicate have always made their comics harder to aggregate than those of any of the other syndicates. I had implemented a convoluted workaround involving redirecting requests for images of their comics through the comics aggregator itself, where various special headers were inserted into the request to convince the King Features web servers to provide the requested content. That worked for quite a while, but as of today, they’ve apparently turned off their old web servers and replaced them with new ones which use a completely different protocol for requesting content.
In short, King Features comics are no longer working in the aggregator. This means that the following comics are currently broken:’
| 6Chix | Lockhorns |
| Baby Blues | Mallard Fillmore |
| Beetle Bailey | Mutts |
| Bizarro | Phantom |
| Blondie | Prince Valiant |
| Curtis | Rhymes with Orange |
| Family Circus | Sally Forth |
| Flash | Shermans Lagoon |
| Funky Winkerbean | Zippy the Pinhead |
| Hagar The Horrible | Zits |
I’m working on restoring them as best as I can, so you will see them creep back into service one by one as I find new ways to retrieve them (it seems unlikely at this point that I will be able to use a single retrieval method for all of them as I was before), but in the end, some of them may prove to be no longer aggregatable.
I will post another update when I’ve done all that I can to get them back.
Pingback: Comics aggregator supports King Features again, sort of « Something better to do