Netcomics is set of perl modules with GUI and command-line front ends all written in perl. Both the command-line & GUI interface allow you to retrieve comic strips from the Web that are continuously being updated each day. Netcomics utilizes a modular set of library perl scripts that provide it information on where to find each specific comic strip. It can be run as a cron job or whenever you'd like.
In order to download comics from the Internet, you will need to either have the appropriate Perl modules, or a command-line program that can do it. A commonly used command-line URL fetcher is wget.
If you don't have a command-line program that can retrieve URL's, then to run netcomics, the following CSPAN perl modules are required: HTML-Parser, libwww-perl, URI, MIME-Base64, and MD5. You can retrieve these as rpms or as sources from the netcomics hompage. See the manpage for CPAN for help on a way to automatically download these modules, or goto http://cpan.perl.org/, or get the rpms from the netcomics homepage (see below). To use the comicpage script, you'll also need to have GtkPerl installed. To use the show_comics script, you'll also need to have perlTk installed.
To install real quick: % perl Makefile.PL; make; make install See INSTALL for complete instructions on how to setup netcomics.
See the manpage for netcomics & comicpage for information on how to use them. HTML versions of the manpages are also created under the doc directory.
See the doc/Comic_Modules-HOWTO.html file to learn how to add your own comics modules. See doc/Modify_Webpage_Creation-HOWTO.html for how to personalize the webpages that can be created with the -w & -W options to netcomics.
This program does not have to be specific to just comic strips. If you have an idea on how it could be implemented more generally for other applications, please let us know. Unimplemented modules are available in the source tree under lib/disabled. So before making additions, be sure to checkout the current cvs source code or download the source or the source package if you've installed this from an rpm or debian package.
Send an email to any of the main authors listed in the AUTHORS file if you wish to submit your own netcomics lib modules for addition in the next release, or to request a specific comic you know the website at which it exists to be added. Of course, bug reports and suggested enhancements are always welcome.
Make sure you include the version of netcomics you are running when sending in a bug report!
Visit the netcomics homepage:
http://netcomics.sourceforge.net/
Future updates are announced on and/or uploaded to:
* http://cpan.org
* http://www.freshmeat.net
* http://www.linuxapps.com
* http://www.linuxberg.com
* the Linux Software Map (http://www.execpc.com/lsm/)
* Netcomics Announce List <netcomics@lists.sourceforge.net>
Copyright (C) 1999-2001 Ben Hochstedler & Elliot Glaysher
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA