Wednesday, November 11, 2009

META: Comics.com's continuing confounding

A comment on the last post notes that the images have stopped working again. And lo, the reason for this seems to be that Comics.com has changed their image hosting, thus breaking all the links of anyone who uses their old embed code.

I could (and for now, will) just use their new embed code, but this poses a problem. What if Comics.com decides to do this again in the future? And what am I going to do about all the posts that I have already made?

I have found that the new code is the same as the old code, just with a different URL. I have figured out how to change the address from old to new with a simple paste. But the site has almost 250 strips already, and each one of those is its own paste. That is basically a whole afternoon down the tubes, with no guarantee that they won't do this again at some later date.

I am looking into solutions. For now, I have fixed the last two posts and the few that are in the queue. I'll see what I can do about the others later....

5 comments:

  1. I haven't used Blogspot at all...is there any facility for putting in custom code, or "widgets"?

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  2. Whatever you have to do to keep the blog going is fine by me. It does look great with the images inline, but the analysis is what I read the blog for. If I have to click through to see the comic in question, so be it. Keep up the good work!

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  3. It's really no big deal to click on the space where the image should be and get taken to comics.com's page where you can view it - if you know to do that. You should put a "See this image on comics.com" link below each image, and then if they move their hosting the link will still work. (If comics.com itself moves, you have bigger problems.)

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  4. Do you have access to the database? If so, you could do a simple find and replace query. Otherwise, maybe export the blog, run the replace in a text editor, and re-import?

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  5. Thanks for the help DmL, that is basically what I'm doing, except the old URLs are just complex enough that using a simple text replace isn't enough to do the whole trick itself. I ended up writing a quickie Python script to handle it, using a regex. On test blogs the process works a treat, I'm just waiting for that blog's RSS feed to update so I can see what it'll mean for feed readers to do this on the main blog.

    Wow lookit me, I sound like someone who almost knows what he's doing! Gosh! Boy howdy! Gee whilikers!

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