[Bug 153872] Comic Strip Plasmoid does not load XKCD comic

[premierSullivan at gmail.com]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153872         




------- Additional Comments From premierSullivan gmail com  2008-01-15 21:49 -------
I'm posting a reply from the webmaster of XKCD.  

Level 1 wrote:
> Dear Davean,
>
> I'm contacting you from the KDE team which is trying to create a desktop 
> widget ("plasmoid") to read daily comic strips like xkcd.  Our original code 
> attempted to retrieve daily comic strips (grabbing a comic strip associated 
> with the date).  However, since xkcd strips are not dated, there was some 
> trouble loading them.  Aaron J. Seigo said, 
> "that's because xkcd doesn't have a comic available for every day, and the 
> comic engine tries to load the comic from the current day by default. it 
> would probably make sense to show a "no comic available today" message in 
> that case, or even if possible just show the latest one. (note that this 
> isn't unique to the xkcd comic support, though, it's true of all of them.) 
>  
>  in any case, i can confirm that the xkcd loader does indeed work as long as 
> there is a comic available for that day. "
>
>   
They are dated, thats available on the archive.
> Several other webcomics have these issues.  I wrote to a kde mailing list,
> "Many of these comics providers would probably be sympathetic to us and want 
> to help us create an access media to their comics (in particular xkcd).  Is 
> it possible to create a common system to access comics and get all or many 
> these comic providers to use it?  It could be as simple as 
> http://$ComicHomePage/CurrentComic.png"
>   
There is a 'current' link, this losses a lot of information though, for 
example the alt text, a common convention in comics. I'd consider this a 
deficient solution. Anyway, including ".png" is bad form, the image 
formates vary, a link that redirects to the correct file would be 
cleaner (and was our solution in the past)

> ... to which Seigo responded,
>  "great idea. just needs someone to start contacting them. you could be that 
> person, even =)"
>
> I assume that since xkcd is Creative Commons licensed, you have no problems 
> making the comic strip accessible by desktop apps.  I hope we can talk 
> further about making comic strips like xkcd easier to access.  If you would 
> like to contact the developers directly, you should write an email to the 
> mailing list: panel-devel kde org , or just talk to me, and I'll talk to 
> them.
>   
Of course we want people to be able to access it easily.

What I don't get is why you don't just come to using the Atom feed. It 
contains all the relevant information, alt text, image and post date in 
a single easy download, or do you want to be able to browse 
historically? We have a solution for that also.
> Thanks for you time!
>
> Sincerely,
> Conor Sullivan
>   
-davean