DailyDilbert

[kjb085]

I’m currently working on a DailyDilbert module. I threw together a web scraper for it already, it’s just a matter of putting together the actual module component of it. I was trying to think if there was a simple way to build a web scraping module to make it agnostic of the web site, but the only solutions I could come up with are more time intensive than I wish to spend on this. That being said, but you could probably modify the code to accommodate the other comic site you’re looking for once I publish MMM-DailyDilbert.

[lavolp3]

Great news!

Thanks, I’m looking forward to it!
A website agnostic module may not be worth the work. I was only looking for DailyDilbert, dailyxkcd already exists.

[Loengard]

I know this topic is quite old, but I was trying to change the Dilbert module to work with the Garfield daily comic (see https://garfield.com/comic or RSS at https://www.comicsrss.com/preview/garfield). But I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do this (complete newbie).

Any ideas or suggestions?

[Maximillium]

This post is deleted!

[Maximillium]

Hi! Is there anyone that could tell me how to shrink the size of the DailyDilbert comic?

[lavolp3]

@maximillium I did it like this but had to search for a while as well.

You can put this in your custom.css and use whatever value you prefer

.MMM-DailyDilbert #dilbert-content {
  width: 900px;
}

A tip if you’re interested:
If you open the mirror in your browser (I’m using chrome mirror_ip:8080) and open the developer’s console with F12 you can see all the css involved (in the “styles” tab). Then you can right-click on the image and press “investigate” or whatever it’s called in english and you can see all the css affecting this picture. You can even toggle properties on/off live. Just discovered all the possibilites with this function working on this problem.

[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.

up to date in 0.568s

[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.

[qu1que]

Hi, I’ve just installed MMM-ComicStrips module, everything worked fine, but only one thing I can’t solve, is the width of the comic. I’ve tried to change the comicWidth value on config.js from 500 to 300 but no result.

Before that, I’d tried MMM-DailyDilbert module, and editing custom.css as @lavolp3 said on another post, but same result.

This is how it shows the comic Dilbert on my mirror:

Any idea on how to solve it?

[lavolp3]

@qu1que
Hi, please do a git pull (maybe also an npm install since I now introduced a package.json) and try it again.
Had a small mistake in the image width description. Thanks for noticing!

I guess I should “publish” this module here so we can move discussion and bugs to another thread.

[qu1que]

@lavolp3

Now it fits perfectly!!

I’ve just have to make git pull inside the module folder. There’s no need to do npm install

Another question, I see that your module is not in the 3rd Party Modules of MM project

https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror/wiki/3rd-party-modules

It would be a good idea to include it.

Thanks for your work!!