Friday, November 19, 2004

If you're a Dilbert fan...

...then surely you must be a geek, just like me. I can't say that I'm insanely into comic strips or anything like that, but a visit to comics.com made me want to have all Dilbert strips really bad.

While I'm not prepared to pony up for their paid service, I did subscribe to the free "Basic" service to see what it looks like. Not being able to wait to start my collection, I decided to fetch the 30 or so strips that are available in the Archive for free.

Obviously I'm not the first person to have such an urge. The guys at comics.com don't use a very common filename scheme for their content, presumably for the exact reason of making mass-fetching harder. A quick search on Google showed that every geek and his grandma has already written a script to fetch these strips. Instead of making my life easier, this simply proved that every minimally proud Dilbert fan must make his/her own script.

And so I proceeded to code my hack, jdilbert. Don't expect much--it's just a hack--but it does work. So much so that my collection now contains exactly 31 strips :)

Update: I rewrote this in ruby and it now handles more comics. Fetch jdstrips now :) I put it in a weekly cron job so that I never miss any.

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