Saturday, February 23, 2008

Grab and convert comics off the Web for portable viewing

When Jacob first got his USB link cable, he tried a little experiment to see whether he could use his PlayStation Portable to read web comics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcomic), and it worked out quite well. This tips will help you to do the same.

Downloading the Comics
The first step will be to download a web comic site of your choosing to your local computer.
Use a web site copier such as HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/) on Windows and Linux or SiteSucker (http://www.sitesucker.us/index.html) on Mac OS X.

Download, install, and launch your web site copier. Supply the URL of the web comic that you want to view on your PSP and start the download. Once you type in the URL, press the download button (the one that looks like a downward-pointed arrow) to begin the download.

Make sure you spend some time adjusting the settings of these web site copiers to exclude downloading any forums associated with your target site, since there are no comics there and forums can add up to quite a lot of HTML pages.

We used Diesel Sweeties (http://www.dieselsweeties.com/) and Cat and Girl (http://www.catandgirl.com/). Download the web comic site of your choice, starting with the archive where all the comics are located.

Downloading all the images and HTML pages on the web site will take a couple of minutes over broadband. While you are doing this, you should seriously consider buying a T-shirt or other fine products from the web comic authors to thank them for providing their comic goodness for your pleasure. We have both Cat and Girl T-shirts and Diesel Sweeties T-shirts, and they rock ever so hard.

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