I had stumbled upon this interesting site (Daily comics by Raghu Angadi) quite a few months ago, which shows you a collection of the daily comic strips from various sources on the net. There are also archives maintained on the site, and so you can catch up on older issues of the strips too. The page is generated using a Perl script, and the author has also included a link to the script source on the page.
I am quite a regular visitor to the site. Yesterday though, when I visited the site, I noticed that all the comic strip images were replaced with links to the actual images. The following is the quote from the author on this: “Well friends, an era comes to end. Uclick.com has asked me not to show images here. I am just providing direct links to the strips. Thanks to all the visitors and to those who took time to write to me.”
However, it is still possible to view the site in its older form, thanks to user scripting which allows you to alter the way a page is displayed in your browser. There are extensions/plugins for various browsers which allow you to create or add small user scripts that alter the way you view a page. For Firefox & Flock, it is the greasemonkey extension, while for IE you have various alternatives like Trixie, Reify Turnabout, GreasemonkIE etc, and Opera has built in support for user scripts. You can find more information on user scripting in the wikipedia entry on greasemonkey.
I have created a greasemonkey script which replaces the links on the mentioned page with the respective images. You can download it from userscripts.org or from here (this one has to be renamed to use .user.js extension in place of .txt – outdated, use the userscripts file). The installation procedure in greasemonkey is quite simple – just drag & drop the script in Firefox (after installing Greasemonkey), & then select install. The script may work in Opera, and with similar plugins for IE, though I’ve not tried it out yet.
Update: Just found a nice post which explains how to use the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
Comments
21 responses to “Daily comics on the net”
I finally added liniks to this page and script page on the comics page. Sorry for the delay. Thanks for the script.
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need some help: i installed the greasemonkey n the script. but it doesnt work when i go to the website..
dunno wad i did wrong..
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This isn’t working anymore for some reason. I think because the links have been changed to say image instead of the actual link.
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Anyone tell me how this works?? I installee Greasemonkey and the script but all I get is an error message stating the server can’t be found??
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yep, it is not working for me either… help, please!
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http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5923
That should work for now… Doesn’t have an archive feature, but it fixes Calvin & Hobbes, and adds a user icon! It’s by William Rawls and Alan Hogan.
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I added the archive link to my script.
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I’ve modified the script (check out the userscripts.org link in the post for the updated script) so that it now works with the pages. The problem was apparently due to some modifications made in the comics page which caused the script to break.
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I just loaded it onto my computer and it works great, thanxs for Calvin and Hobbes.
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Finally…. Aditya, thanks a lot. U have managed to giv me my daily dos of Comics. It works just fine.
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Is there a way that I can add more comics to the script?
Great work though, I can’t start the day without the comics
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Hi Neil. You can have a look at Alan’s greasemonkey script (comment no. 6) if you want to add more comics to the page.
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the boondocks, for better or for worse, and some other comics still don’t work when i use this script. what happened?
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I have a comics page like this that I wrote in PHP.
It has a mysql back-end, so in theory, I could make it totally customizable (add / remove comics, rearrange them, etc) if people liked my page well enough to use it regularly.
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Alan, enjoyed the website, how could I make that page customizable, there are a few comics I would like to add.
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I found out about this interesting site:
http://www.ComicsHQ.net
Anyone knows anything about this site?
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dont realy like it
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i geuss its alright not bad
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thank you so much
viva la pearls before swine
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I’ve created a cool little desktop application called Comic Gopher that automatically fetches your favorite comics. It supports most of the comics on Angadi’s page and a bunch of others. You can check it out at:
http://comicgopher.com/
I also put together a quick iGoogle gadget which will show you comics on your Google homepage.
http://comicgopher.com/igoogle.php
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can u please add my link on your page.. I will add u.. Please buzz me when u are done..
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