Better Static Images for Amphibian.com

The new, improved version of the image for a recent comic.

As I mentioned last week, I have been working to close Issue #7 on my webcomic. Basically, Amphibian.com is not a normal webcomic. It's not an image, which is great until someone wants to share a link to a comic on social media. I auto-generate static images of the comic just for sharing. But the comics which contain embedded games and stuff haven't looked right in the static captures. I wanted to at least put a warning in the image that explains why they often look weird, but as an added bonus I actually made them look better (most of the time).

As you can see in the picture on the right, I was able to add some warning text to the top of dynamic comics. I generally share this version on TopWebcomics.com but you may see it other places as well. When people see comics like this in the future, they'll know that they should view it on Amphibian.com to get the full effect.

Also, when this comic was originally published, the third frame was black. The game was not captured as part of the image. This was due to two things - the URL of the page used for the image capture was such that the game's image assets could not be loaded, and the fact that the capture was taken before the game initialized asynchronously. I fixed the URL issue by changing the static image comic path from /basic/[comic-number] to /[comic-number]&b=1. There wasn't really a generic way to ensure the comic will be rendered before the capture in all cases, but I added a 500 millisecond delay which should be good enough the majority of the time.

Finally, I also locked-down the ability to see the basic versions of the comic. It was the case that you could view a future comic if you asked for the basic rendering. I changed the rules so that only authenticated users or requests coming from the server itself can see them. I use PhantomJS to perform the image capture and it runs on the server, so that was a simpler fix than I initially thought that it would be.

It always feels good to resolve an issue. It also feels good to read one of my comics. Here's the link so you can feel good too.

Amphibian.com comic for 18 April 2016