Re: [phpgrabcomics-announce] Another patch

> but if you report me the problems that you are having, I'll try to do my
> best to solve them.

True, but then I'll never learn how this whole thing is put together  :) 
  Thanks for the offer, but I'll keep puzzling through it.  That way, I 
can report on everything I find and we can include documentation about it.

> I had a look now at the code and actually some of those features could
> be optional. It might be worth having a look at parts of the software
> that could degrade more gracefully - I'll do it as soon as I have a bit
> more time. At the present time, if the server doesn't have gd,
> phpGrabComics doesn't bother to do a lot of stuff, while gd is used
> mainly for the thumbnails.

Well, yeah.  It's far better if some things are "optional but still 
work."  I'll take a look at that after I get things working on my end.

> in the first releases phpGrabComics allowed people to download *copies*
> of the comics from the phpGrabComics web site.

I'm sure that wasn't so good for bandwidth  :)

> I have removed that feature. When phpGrabComics is installed and
> working, it will save copies of the comics in the archive, but they will
> not be available for general public (the security is very weak tough -
> that is done mainly to avoid inclusion in search engines of the comics
> and direct links to the copies of the comics)

Well, looks like we agree that that level of security isn't really 
necessary... just enough to kill 90% of use is typically fine.

> the system administrator, instead, can access the copies of the comics
> from the web interface.
> 
> non-system administrators can use the RSS feeds to see the comics in
> their RSS clients.

This makes much more sense than how I thought it worked.  Does the 
server need to get a copy of the comic to be able to offer the RSS feed? 
    Without grabbing copies, it wouldn't let me grab the RSS feed.

> some of the RSS feeds are hidden because of complaints from copyright
> holders. they are still available but the links are not shown. a simple
> parameter replacement can show them for any user that bothers trying.

Answering their complaints in letter if not spirit?  :)  I guess if you 
know how to get around it, you're probably only making it for "personal" 
use.

> at the beginning, the was the default behaviour: a phpGrabComics
> installation was adding a hundred comics, publically available in your
> web site, supposedly to attract visitors.

I would imagine it would be so they could aggregate the comics... at 
least that's why I do it.  I might use phpGrabComics if I wanted to 
redistribute the comics, but as I'm sure you've found out, that's 
against the TOS's of most of the comics out there.

> yes, the ones at server.phpgrabcomics.org
> 
> Yesterday I did run the statistics software for the first time on the
> domain and that's what I got:
> -2121 visits
> -23035 requests
> -113.16 mb of bandwidth

holy cow...  that's a lot of requests.  What's happening is much more 
clear now:  people think about installing the software, and get a "why 
should I bother?" feeling when they realize that they just have to 
modify your feed a bit to get any comic they want in RSS form.

It's probably worth going through old forums / whatever you have from 
users about what they used phpGrabComics for.  From your statistics, it 
looks like they all just use your RSS feed and get it over with.

However, it certainly doesn't look like phpGrabComics is a failure from 
those statistics.  Those are some good usage numbers.

> SharpReader is the most used client to visit my
> server.phpgrabcomics.org... And I think that there are several caches of
> the feeds, around.

Not bad at all.

Another question I found:  Why is phpgrabcomics_file defined as .php for 
a user, and .xml for a developer?  And why does the .xml file just 
include the .php file?  It's not parsed correctly, I don't see how that 
would ever work.

If you're trying to get the MIME type right, PHP allows you to set 
headers manually... then there's no reason for that include statement. 
Seems like it would break things.  Want me to take it out / fix it?

Jim