Chris Muir, Vertical
I’ve wanted to display Chris Muir’s daily comic strip Day by Day on my site, but I was met with a bit of a logistical problem: the horizontal orientation of the strip doesn’t meld well with the thin vertical sidebars on my website.
I saw Day by Day displayed in a vertical orientation over at Cold Fury, but after reading, I found that Mike had been reorienting the strip by hand.
I’ve never been much for cumbersome daily image manipulation, so I simply wrote a PHP script to do the dirty work for me. After figuring out the current date (and from that, the URL of the day’s comic), some fancy CSS frames the individual frames by making them the absolutely positioned background of a DIV. A transparent GIF, the size of the DIV is placed within the DIV so that the DIV can be clickable as a link in IE and still validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
While I was at it, I decided to put in the ability to look at past comics right here. I had to expand the size of my sidebars to 185px each, up from 170px to accommodate the frames, but I don’t think it is all that noticeable.
If you haven’t yet written any letters to help Chris get syndicated, go do it! And if you aren’t familiar with his strip, get familiar!
Update: I have released the script.
Excellent work. I’m very impressed. That is the #1 reason I never posted his strip on my blog. I may have to rethink my layout now.
Let me know if you want to give the code a test run. The script went through multiple rewrites within the last 24 hours, and is pretty frightening to behold (i.e. redundant at times, not easily customizable), but it works. The biggest improvement I put in was having it make sure that a strip exists for the current day before trying to display it. If it doesn’t, it displays yesterday’s.
You’re welcome to the work in progress code if you want it, otherwise I’ll just let you know when I’ve got it in a releasable form.
Mark, you never cease to amaze me.
Good thing you have editable comments to, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to come back and explain why I put my name down as Mark on this comment.
By the way, its because I’m a dumbass.
Comment Edited: 11:55:35 PM
Love it. Are you making the script available?
Rob (aka, Mark, above) – haha, that’s one major brain fart there. Now you see why I have a “badge” show up next to the comments that are REALLY from me.
Aaron – I’m working on making the script more user-friendly, and then I’ll release it. It’ll be sometime later today. I’m just polishing up a few extra features, such as the option to show the most recent comment as a JavaScript dropdown, and the ability to edit how many past days are shown, and even to tweak the virtual boxes that frame the individual frames of the strip, in case Chris ever drastically adjusts the strip sometime in the future.
The script has been released.
Vertical Days
Day by Day is my favorite cartoon strip, but it is only available in a horizontal form which makes it difficult to properly syndicate on a blog. Until now, that is: Mark over at Tempus Fugit has come up with a clever…
Acronyms are fun Might this be a reference to the PHP script I wrote that displays Day by Day in thevertical orientation? Visit The King of Fools to see what it looks like in action, as right now I am using an alternative display scheme.