DailyDilbert

Loengard

Hi there - in the hope someone could point me in the right direction, any ideas on how to create a module for the daily Garfield comic?

lavolp3

@loengard What you would need basically is a scraping function.
One of my (too many) projects currently is to create a module like MMM-WebScraper.
However, I think it should be possible to take MMM-DailyXKCD or MMM-DailyDilbert as a start. There is a scraper included somehow, haven’t looked at the code yet.

Then you could change the basic url to the Garfield comic.

I’ll check it out as well.

lavolp3

@loengard Well it’s done. The changes were quite easy :-)
Try it out, it is very rough and there are several things still called “Dilbert” :-).

https://github.com/lavolp3/MMM-DailyDilbert

I think it would make sense to eventually create a “ComicStrip” module and let the user choose between Dilbert, Garfield, xkcd and what else can be created. @kjb085 was already mentioning a website agnostic module.

But I’d like to leave the decision to @andrecarlucci (or is it @kjb085?) and/or @Blastitt who have put much more work into it.

Loengard

I only saw your message now. Thank you so much!!

smackenzie5

Thanks @lavolp3 - worked well.

surger13

@lavolp3
i need help. i can’t get it to work. the screen stays black when the module is active. during installation i get the following message:

pi@MagicMirrorPi:~/MagicMirror/modules/MMM-ComicStrips $ npm install
npm WARN saveError ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/pi/MagicMirror/modules/package.json'
npm WARN enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/pi/MagicMirror/modules/package.json'
npm WARN modules No description
npm WARN modules No repository field.
npm WARN modules No README data
npm WARN modules No license field.

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bhepler

It appears that the installation instructions on MMM-ComicStrips didn’t include everything from MMM-DailyDilbert. Try this instead:
npm install -p cheerio.

surger13

@bhepler
Thanks bhelper, that’s it.

In my opinion it would be a nice option for the module if you could select multiple comics to be displayed at selectable intervals, not just one as in the current version. I find it hard to choose one ;)

lavolp3

@surger13 You know what? I have this nearly finished. Multiple comics to choose from, adjustable intervals etc etc.
It’s not easy however, since the comics have different sizes.
I’ll send a link for beta testing as soon as I’m finished.

surger13

@lavolp3
Glad to hear it and thank you for your efforts.
With the current MMM-ComicStrips module, “garfield” and “peanuts” remain black.
Also the parameter timeForDaily doesn’t seem to work for me. Only one comic is displayed the whole day.