The GIPppiest GIP that ever was GIPped!: zorac

The GIPppiest GIP that ever was GIPped!

See my new icon? That's today’s Dilbert strip - whatever day you're reading this (except Sundays at the moment). Nifty, huh? I have a bunch of perl which grabs the latest strip from the Dilbert website, cuts it up, resizes the parts to make an animated GIF then uploads it to LJ in place of the existing one.

The first part is grabbing the strip - slightly non-trivial as they stick a random number in the image name for exactly that purpose, but I did this years ago to grab the latest Dilbert and User Friendly for the company intranet each day.

Creating the icon was surprisingly straightforward using ImageMagick - a bit of manual inspection to figure out where the box boundaries are, then coding up a few simple crop and resize operations, and the save out as an animation works automagickally.

By far the hardest part was doing the upload, involving a whole bunch of HTTP requests:

Hit the login page with the username and password to get session cookies.
Grab the current edit pics page, saving all the existing icon names and which one is default (this info has to be sent back with the two updates), also to find the ID of the existing Dilbert icon.
Post to the edit pics page to delete the existing icon.
Upload the new icon, and parse the page to find out the new ID.
Post to the edit pics page one final time to put the keyword on the newly uploaded icon.

The final step is to tie the three stages together and run them at a suitable time to catch the Dilbert site after it has been updated. Future plans include some code clean-up and handling the Sunday strip (if it will fit into 100KiB).

Update: W00t! It works! Todays strip is there completely sans human intervention.

jiggery_pokery

September 25 2003, 16:43:03 UTC 17 years ago

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Super-nifty!

I would say that was lj_nifty-worthy, but l_n tends to be for things that people can do themselves at least as much as it is for people to show off.

But, hey... :-)

zorac

September 26 2003, 00:49:56 UTC 17 years ago

I want to do some code cleanup and the like before posting to

lj_nifty - I'm sure that the upload script in particular could be useful to other folk.

dinahrae

September 25 2003, 16:54:34 UTC 17 years ago

O_o That's one of the neatest things I've ever seen.

hermorrine

September 25 2003, 21:39:32 UTC 17 years ago

Please do me. I'm begging.

September 26 2003, 00:48:22 UTC 17 years ago

Alas, my 'plane tickets are for a fortnight from now :-(

September 26 2003, 10:15:26 UTC 17 years ago

You bought your tickets?!

September 26 2003, 10:41:47 UTC 17 years ago

Yah. Somehow I forgot to mention it last night. They weren't getting any cheaper - in fact they looked liable to get more expensive if I waited any longer.