make your own comix collection

Feel free to get and use my perl script hncc (Heikos new Comix Collector) to build these pages on your own machine. It is not yet as polished as i would wish (it has grown historically...) but it works quite well. The description mechanisms used in the comix.lst could use a lot more explanation and documentation however. You need:

perl (for windows machines get it from Active State, for other architectures see cpan: the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network)
my hncc script
my list with comix descriptions

once you installed perl, put hncc.pl and comix.lst together into one directory, make a subdirectory download and try to run


 perl hncc.pl -v -A 0.1 -d download comix.lst

(the -v parameter (verbose) shows the progress of downloading, the -A number parameter describes the probability of watching the sites advertisements [in this case the script downloads all of the ad banners it finds and 'clicks thru' with a 10% probability - and immeadietly (sp?) discards them after download])

then you will get

a file 19991108.ref.html (or whatever todays date is)
containing inline references to all accessible comix in comix.lst
lots of subdirectories within the directory download where all the retrieved images are stored (make sure, you don't make this available publicly - it would definitely constitute a copyright violation)
a file download/19991108.loc.html with inline links to all the images already on your harddisk.
some temporary files in the current directory... i should propably take care of them in furure versions.

If you get an error about ...Module LWP not found... your perl installation is missing the lib-www-perl package (which makes ist easy to write programs behaving like a web-browser). To install it for ActiveState perl, type:

ppm
install libwww-perl

for a cpan distribution of perl, type:

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install LWP

There are a lot of other tools out there for creating similar collections, each has its pros and cons. see for yourself:

and probably many more...

another tool of mine you might find usefull to harvest comic archives for offline viewing and archiving is wgrab

Page Author: Heiko Hellweg, Modified: Feb. 2001