Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Calvin and Hobbes GoComics Widget


My family and I are sworn Calvin and Hobbes fans. I have followed Calvin and Hobbes on my Mac's Dashboard Widget called FreeComics. FreeComics used to pull many comic strips from gocomics.com. A few days ago, GoComics changed the URL format for Calvin and Hobbes and made it very difficult to link to the image file. As a result, my widget stopped working and I was left wanting for Calvin and Hobbes. Reading the newspaper is unthinkable. Indian newspapers' quality decays exponentially. The quality of journalism and ethics is lower than a worm's belly button.

I had to find an alternative for my Calvin and Hobbes Dashboard Widget. There was no way I was going to visit GoComics.com's website for my daily dose of C&H and nor was I going to subscribe to their email service.

The solution was absolutely elegant and brilliant. For quite a while now, Safari has provided a feature called Web Clips. Web Clips allow you to take a snippet of any web page and place it in your Dashboard as a widget. So all I had to do was:

a) Navigate to http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes in Safari.

b) Click on the Web Clips icon (the one with a scissor).

c) Mouse over the comic image and select the nearest matching web page element.

d) Click in the selected element and adjust the size if needed.


When done, click Add in the top right bar, and voila, you have your Dashboard web clip! Enjoy your comics distraction-free!

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