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Software for comics

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Sean C:
I actually found a blog owned by someone who created a program that e-mails the latest comic of comic X when it updates, and that my comic was listed among the 10 or 12 he had written code for. A short time after that, several nasty spider programs hit CNG and ate up a ton of bandwidth, which we had to pay for. The best part was one of those programs was downloading every image on the site, and got caught in a loop, endlessly repeating the task. That one did the most damage. Seems suspect to me, hmmm; perhaps said programmer's coding wasn't as good as it seemed.

No, I don't like those applications, for reasons like that. Many kinds of programs that could download comics could hit a site like those spiders did, cost the comickers money they don't necessarily have, and deny those creators a few extra needed clicks on Google ads to help make up the cost. If you want to read it, just go to the damn site. It's more work to download the application, make the folder, etc...

Alegis:
Just tried it and downloaded ctrl alt del and QC

Very nice, as it works sweet with the comics in that list.

As for wondermark, which I was just about to read, the comics range from
http://www.wondermark.com/comics/1.gif  to ~167.gif.
What am I doing wrong if I set it to Linear and the path to http://www.wondermark.com/comics/%i%.gif ?

Well Sean, prefer to read on sites that have a nice system like WM, this is merely for archive purposes to find that one comic faster.

Doing a great job !

ComicFan:
Thank you for your critics.

I have some answers for some of your questions:


Sean C, this is a program, not a web application, it has nothing to do with spiders, and the application doesn't go thru the pages and searches for links or anything... the paths are generated with the help of variables. You tell the program exactly what you want to get and he gets it. After each download, the index or the date is incremented, and the new data saved into the configuration file of each comic, so no image is downloaded twice. It even generates less trafic, because none of the rest of the elements from the page need to be downloaded :). You can download the program and if you don't trust it, use whatever programs necessary to see the exchage of information. It only connects to the sites of the comics, and only gets images, nothing more. And another thing... it's not that difficult to download one zip file (which is not even very big... under 1 mb) and unpack. The program takes care of all the folders... you don't have to create folder for each comics...

Alegis, I have studied the comic site that you exemplified. There was one little mistake in your judgement... it's not 1.gif, but 001.gif. So the correct variable would be %3i%. That way, it will be a 3 characters long index, starting from 1: 001, ..., 009, 010, ..., 099, 100, ... and so on. On your side, you can use any index variable you like... I prefere to use %5i%, so I'd get filenames that have 5 character names, filled with zeroes. That way, if I sort the images in Windows explorer after name, they'll be in the correct order. So if the program gets the file 001.gif, on my computer it will be saved as 00001.gif, and so on...

So, if you want to create rules for that comic, use for the url:

--- Code: ---http://www.wondermark.com/comics/%3I%.gif
--- End code ---

and for the save path you can use something like:

--- Code: ---%gp%%name%\%5I%.gif
--- End code ---

On this forum I don't think I can attach files, but if you want the content of the Wondermark comic file, create a new text file, write the following content in it:

--- Code: ---[Comic]
name=Wondermark
URL=http://www.wondermark.com/comics/%3I%.gif
type=1
start year=2006
start month=4
start day=26
start index=1
first year=0
first month=0
first day=0
first index=1
save dir=%gp%%name%\%5I%.gif
last comic=
site=http://www.wondermark.com
last comic's date=0

--- End code ---


  and then rename your file to Wondermark.cmc and either manually copy it in the engines folder, or use the Comic -> Import comic command if the file is in another directory. If you copy the file manually in the engines folder, restart the program in order for the comic settings to load.

Hope it helpes.

ComicFan:
I've made a new version of the program. With this release, you can also download comics that need a referer. To make the new version work, just read the readme.txt file included in the archive.

Also, there are about 50 comics included in this release, but you can make rules for as many as you want :)

The program can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy :)

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