Basic Images are Complicated

I sat down tonight thinking that I would quickly resolve Comic Issue #7, which has to do with the static images generated for sharing on social media platforms. Here it is almost midnight and I am not finished.

It's been bothering me that many of the dynamic comics (the ones that use JavaScript for a game or something) are not rendering correctly at all as static images. See this post on how I generate the static images. I finally figured out that it is because I take pictures of "basic" versions of the comics (no header, footer, etc.) and I generated the "basic" versions of the comics at a slightly different URL. When the page rendered there, sometimes file paths used in embedded JavaScript would be wrong and lead to missing resources which in turn leads to a bad picture.

Another problem with this method was that I render the images before the comic's official release date and so I had to leave the basic URL open - that is, no authentication was required to see future comics if you requested them in basic form. I doubt that many people took advantage of this flaw, but still...

Of course I wanted to fix all these problems in addition to just marking dynamic comics as dynamic in the basic view. So I'm not finished with any of it. I'm like, 85% finished. But tomorrow is another day. A day in which I might write another post about what I actually did to fix the problems! Until then, entertain yourself with today's comic. It's funny, and that's no accident.

Amphibian.com comic for 15 April 2016