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.
