phpGrabComics / News: Recent posts

Hi everyone,
phpGrabComics main server (server.phpgrabcomics.org) is receiving an unexpected - and far to extensive amount of traffic at the present time.

At the present time, in February, phpGrabComics is generatin more than 200 mb of daily traffic from users, and three times more from robots.

Which makes it 18 GB of traffic per month, between users and robots.

You can read more about this issue in the phpGrabComics web site: http://phpgrabcomics.org/traffic_problems... read more

The phpGrabComics demo site, formerly included in my personal web site (baravalle.it), has now been moved to it's own, indipendent web address, at server.phpgrabcomics.org.

An automatic redirection is in place.

Andres

phpGrabComics is now available for download. It's the first version since May 2005.

The new release is including updated modules - many of them were outdated - and a more user-friendly installation procedure.

Have fun!

Andres

Hi everyone,
I have finished processing the patches sent in the past weeks (well - months in some cases).

They are now all live at http://baravalle.it/phpGrabComics

I'll check for other broken modules and I'll try to realese a new version of phpGrabComics as soon as possible.

Andres

Hi everyone,
I'm sorry but I still have load problems. phpGrabComics is down again today untill I can figure how to cope with the traffic, which is massive.

Andres

After 11 days of breack, the phpGrabComics test server at baravalle.it is back again. This has been the longest pause in the service - but I'm afraid there were not many choices.

Enjoy your comics back!
Andres

Hi everyone,
as many of you will have noticed, baravalle.it has been down in the past days. It is likely that it will be down in the next days too.

I hope I will be able to take it up at some time in the next days but I'm not sure yet on how to proceed.

What happened is that I had to migrate baravalle.it to a new provider. It is now hosted in a dedicated server, that I use for 10 domains.

The problem is that as soon as I take baravalle.it up, the *dedicated* server is overloaded by the incoming traffic. The server is including websites of my customers - which pay my costs - so I cannot afford to have baravalle.it up if it is taking down the websites of my customers.... read more

A group of comics that were broken have been updated.

Moreover, there is now support for Internet Explorer and other RSS clients that do not support the type of internal DTD that phpGrabComics is using.

More information on how to generate a RSS with an external DTD is available here: http://www.baravalle.it/phpGrabComics/docs/user.html

Nearly one hundred more comics have been added by Greg in the past days, as patches. Today I had the time to review them and a new patch is available.

The patch updates the last beta of phpGrabComics and allows to have even more comics and more information in each comic.

Much work has been done in the past months to produce the phpGrabComics 1.5 stable.

The stable version will be published after checking the last patches from Greg at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=33239&atid=407575

phpGrabComics documentation has been out-of-date for much time, and it was not covering many of the features of the software.
The new phpGrabComics HOW-TO (for users of phpGrabComics) is available at http://www.baravalle.it/phpGrabComics/how_to.php
The new phpGrabComics guide for modules developers is available at http://www.baravalle.it/phpGrabComics/modules_development.php

Beta release of phpGrabComics 1.5 is quite stable. If no bugs will be found in the next days, it will be moved to stable.

1.5 branch is including many minor changes, bug corrections and better support for XML syndication.

phpGrabComics modules have been update. While it is yet time for a new release, you can find the new modules files at http://www.baravalle.it/phpGrabComics/phpgrabcomics-modules-dev.zip

The modules are for use in the last beta release, but there is some compatibility with previous versions (not full compatibility).

phpGrabComics is, at the present time, hosted in a shared server, and my provider has contacted me because the work load is not acceptable.

Basically, I will need more resources and specific for the phpGrabComics project. I still have to decide if to allocate those resources personally or to put the project in a stand by. In that case I will still develop phpGrabComics, but I will not publish the RSS files and web services any more. I have asked a quote to my provider, and I'm waiting for their answer.... read more

In a few weeks a stable release of phpGrabComics will be hopefully released. I have seen, with pleasure, that there is a strong interest in the new RSS syndication features.

Syndication features are already used by hundreds of web sites.

The next step - after bug checking is at a reasonable point - is the inclusion of phpGrabComics in the mayor distributions: Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, FreeBSD. Help is appreciated.

phpGrabComcis 1.5beta has been released today. New modules included. Use it and help finding bugs.

After a long while, a new version of phpGrabComics for nuke has been released. The main improvement of this version is that the comics are downloaded from the original web site, not from any cache site. Enjoy!

You can now read your favourite comics using Thunderbird, day by day! No need of other software installed. See the how-to at http://www.baravalle.it/phpGrabComics/syndication_thunderbird.php.

Comics that were no more available have been removed from the main web site.
Corrected comics that were not updating, including Userfriendly, that was not working since June.
Added Prince Valiant, Mandrake and Flash Gordon.

pygrabcomics is the last developed phpgrabcomics port, optimised for speed. it connects to a phpGrabComics site, gets information of available comics, and then downloads and archives them.

pygrabcomics is written in python.

phpGrabComics is now including a new desktop creator, available at
http://www.baravalle.it/phpGrabComics/desktop_creator.php.

It allows to build a custom web page including your favourite comics and using a custom background, to be used as desktop background or default home page in the browser.

After the success of phpgrabcomics for desktop, a new port of phpgrabcomics has been developed.

phpGrabComcs for nuke is a web service that allows to grab comic strips from web sites and include them in phpnuke.

Actually it supports grabbing today's strip from several sites, like Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes and Snoopy.

As you can see looking at the main site, phpGrabComics development boosted in the last weeks, after several months of slow activity.
Next phpGrabComics major version will be lighter and simpler than previous, and will be ready in a few weeks. In the meanwhile you can test phpGrabComics 1.2 or phpGrabComics for desktop 1.2.

Added modules for Andi Capp, Marmaduke, Heathcliff and Forattini.

phpGrabComics 0.1 is supporting multimodule actions: it means that you can manage in the same time multiple modules.
You can see it "live" at baravalle.it/phpGrabComics.