hello juan and alice, i just spent some time catching up with a large dose of comic strips culled from a variety of online sources. for those of you who read my other dribble on the lists, this article points to some old stuff (yeah, i still use some programs that i've written about a long time ago, including our beloved gnu/linux OS) and a new find.
normally, it would take me a long time to do so because there are so many different websites that provide comic strips daily. there are a number of utilities out there though that make this pastime less of a chore than it should be. programs that collect information from disparate sources and make them accessible in one location are called aggregators. more common aggregators are aimed at collecting news sites (techie or non-techie news). here are some aggregators that i have discovered and used. i use Plucker on my gnu/linux box at home to snarf my favorite news sources so i can read them on the road on my Palm m100 (well, it isn't really mine, but it practically is.) there was a time that i would use the pluck-comics aggregator included with plucker to grab my daily dose of the funnies, but the m100 doesn't really have that much memory and isn't in color, so some of the glorious art that is featured in comic strips is sometimes lost in that medium. to be fair, plucker provides an option to store the downloaded files in the original file formats someplace on the disk. (http://www.plkr.org) another good utility that i use in conjunction with plucker is sitescooper (http://www.sitescooper.org). what's neat about sitescooper is that aside from providing an aggregator on your box, it can spew the aggregated stuff out in a variety of formats. of course you will have to have the other conversion utilities if you want the other formats. but it -can- do aggregation onto your hard disk in HTML if you so choose. i'll leave it to you to explore those options on your own. uhm... hmmm... caveat... you will have to configure it using a text editor, but the config files are fairly straightforward. my latest find though is "dailystrips", which is an aggregator that is focused on COMIC STRIPS! dailystrips is a perl script that does the job of either generating an index file that points to all the strips of choice for viewing in a browser, or if you run it with the -l or --local switch, it will also retrieve the comic strips and store them on your hard disk for perusal at your own leisure. the maintainers of dailystrips keep an up-to-date strips.def file, which contains the info about over 300 comics online (and growing more with user contributions). what i do is run "dailystrips -l all" in a directory of choice when i'm online (no, i no longer have the luxury of an always on dialup link :-( ) and then fire up gqviewer in fullscreen mode. i get to read all the current comic strips from all over without having to go through the trouble of firing up a web browser and visiting all those sites myself. (http://dailystrips.sourceforge.net) have fun! eric - sites mentioned: Plucker - http://www.plkr.og sitescooper - http://www.sitescooper.org dailystrips - http://dailystrips.sourceforge.net Debian install hint: apt-get install plucker sitecooper sitescooper-sites dailystrips -- ___ _____________________________ eric pareja (xenos AT maharlika.upm.edu.ph) \e/ [ Philippine Linux Users' Group ] Linux User #8159 http://counter.li.org _v_ [Python Power!] [Debian Rocks!] [Ubiquitous Computing] Software & \\\\/ Free the books! [http://www.bookcrossing.com/referral/pusakat] Freedom .\\/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/pusakat | www.upm.edu.ph/~xenos/weblog _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
