Google Comics
This is the most recent and arguably the best project that I’ve done. It started as a simple premise – that I wanted the comics on my desktop to be updated automatically. It then started to save the comics to disk, building up a nice archive of comics that don’t otherwise provide a (good enough) archive – notably, Dilbert.
After my hard drive self-destructed, I needed another solution – somewhere better to store my comics. At this point, I had just obtained a Gmail invite and was swamped with 1000Mb of space that I didn’t think I’d ever use. These two facts came together perfectly, and I wrote a script that emails the new comics to a particular email address. Thus the script went through two languages (Visual Basic to PHP) and three incarnations into its current form.
It is fairly simple to use – each comic needs variables set – where the page with the comic on is, the strings around the comic url and the name of the comic – which is then used to open an HTML file and the email is composed, and sent to the appropriate address.</p><p>The script is easy to edit to send the comics you want to the address you want – instructions are included in the download, and it can be found here. Enjoy!