getgarfield

Java application that downloads all Garfield comic strips

Type: Command line application
Platforms: Linux, *BSD, Windows, macOS, others
Written in: Java

Important: Application currently non-functional

As of Sa 2020-10-24 the comic strip picture URLs used by getgarfield have been offline for some time, and the pictures are now being hosted from different URLs.

Unlike the previous URLs, these new URLs cannot be calculated directly from known days.

Unfortunately getgarfield's design relies on this being possible.
I am currently not motivated enough to re-write the download logic, please do not expect a fix for getgarfield anytime soon.

Usage

This is a command line application that is supposed to be called with a single argument. The single argument is the target directory where the comic strips should be downloaded to:

<program invocation> targetDirectory

Example:

java -jar getgarfield-0.2.1.jar garfield-comic-strips

The application requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 8 or greater to run.

Also creates two XHTML web sites that present the comic strips by month, one "offline" web site that displays the downloaded strips and another "online" web site that uses the original source URLs where the strips are downloaded from.

Skips comic strips that are already present; running it again on the same target directory will just re-create the web sites and download what new comic strips are missing.
As such, the large initial download may be aborted and resumed anytime.

As of May 2020 the downloaded comic strips amount to about 1.8 GiB.
If you are just interested in the "online" web site you can simply abort the application after it states that said web site has been created, and delete the "offline" web site along with any comic strips that have been downloaded so far.

License

GNU General Public License version 3

Packages

Arch Linux

Browseable sources

These source files of the latest tag can be viewed in the browser:

src/getgarfield/GetGarfield.java

Building from source

Building the application requires a Java Development Kit (JDK) version 8 or greater. It does not have any further dependencies.

The program entry point (the class containing the main() method) is "getgarfield.GetGarfield".

Releases

If you want to download and then run the application you should download the latest release's runnable .jar file. These .jar files also contain the source code; because of this they can be redistributed freely on their own without violating the license.

getgarfield-0.2.2

06 July 2020 (2020-07-06 21:31:07 UTC)

getgarfield-0.2.2.tar.gz SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

getgarfield-0.2.2.jar SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

Simplify parallel downloading code
Improve messages
Parallel downloading: Enqueue the follow-up download runnable before attempting to download the comic strip
Do not re-generate existing "comic strips of month" XHTML files if such a file already exists and contains the whole month

getgarfield-0.2.1

24 May 2020 (2020-05-24 18:38:49 UTC)

getgarfield-0.2.1.tar.gz SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

getgarfield-0.2.1.jar SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

Update list of known missing comic strips; as of May 24th 2020 there is a comic strip for every day since the strip's inception

getgarfield-0.2.0

06 November 2019 (2019-11-06 21:55:01 UTC)

getgarfield-0.2.0.tar.gz SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

getgarfield-0.2.0.jar SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

Fix for a tiny race condition that sometimes caused an uncritical RejectedExecutionException to be printed to STDERR
Month pages: Change the comic strips' "id" tags from "1..N" to "day1..dayN" because these tags may not start with a digit in XHTML
Handle known missing comic strips (days for which no comic strip has been published)
Update "Summary" section in README to be in sync with the current javadoc class comment

getgarfield-0.1.5

10 August 2019 (2019-08-10 15:01:15 UTC)

getgarfield-0.1.5.tar.gz SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

getgarfield-0.1.5.jar SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

Generate a more compact index page
Fix path for temporary styles file

getgarfield-0.1.4

19 July 2019 (2019-07-19 23:30:18 UTC)

getgarfield-0.1.4.tar.gz SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

getgarfield-0.1.4.jar SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

Update most recent known-to-exist comic strip to 2019-07-19
Update class documentation
Improve naming, documentation and ordering of various constants
Generated XHTML: Do not pad the day-of-month comic strip ID with a leading zero
Rename occurrences of "comic" to "comicStrip"
Renamed some methods and static fields to improve naming consistency

getgarfield-0.1.3

20 February 2019 (2019-02-20 20:19:20 UTC)

getgarfield-0.1.3.tar.gz SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

getgarfield-0.1.3.jar SHA256 checksum SHA384 checksum PGP signature

Some improved code documentation
Some small fixes to the generated web sites concerning the use of non-breaking spaces
The online-URL comic strips web site is now generated 14 days into the future plus however many days it takes to fill the rest of the month
Changed the XHTML colors back to the previous light-on-dark theme
Changed the XHTML colors to a black-on-light-grey theme
Use Year or YearMonth instead of LocalDate where appropriate
Changed the index page's title to "Index" for consistency with the month pages
Added message levels prefixes to the STDOUT messages (ERROR, WARN, INFO)
Some code cleanup and refactoring