What is Sluggy Freelance. Well I am hardly an authority on the subject, but here goes. It is a comic strip consisting of various scopes. From the silly puns that can be found in single comics to the many twisting and building plot lines that move through the series. It is often hard to just jump into the series. It is best to start at the beginning. I find that the nifty author Pete Abrams does a excellent job of developing the character from the beginning. It is quarky, strange. I complete digest of pop culture satire. From Buffy to Blair witch, Star War and Crocidile(sp) Hunter it is all a target for this light harter adventure through randomness. I personally enjoy the anime references, and feel the strip has be influenced in terms of plot construction by anime. Generally it is a excellently writen comic strip that building on the simple two dimension that Pete starts with into some sort strange deep multi-dimension master piece where you just might need a flux agitator to get around.
I was first told about Sluggy Freelance during my first (and excellent) term of university. At the time I did not have time to investigate further. Once I got on my co-op work term I had more than enough time to waste. So one day I remember sluggy. I traveled to the web page and was imediately confused. I left but lucky came back a few days later. I enter the views guide and actually started at the beginning of the strip. I loved and read through first year in 2 day at the most. I got to about 1999 when something happened. I was restricted from going to the sluggy.com domain. Seeing how to read each comic I had to hit the domain this raised the number of hits causing the netwerrk admins (which were about size of the Canadian sheild away from me) to notice it and restrict it. I guess there was much I could do. I wasn't doing anything better at work because it took time for them to generate work to me to do, and once they did I always completed sooner then they expected. (I do have a work ethic) but what to do in the mean time? Well this fustrated me. I thought for a while, and soon how to get around this was better way to waste time them reading the comic was.
I decided to write java programs to leech the data. And that is what this website is really about. I wrote a few classes and did some testing until I had a system that worked. See what I really wanted was a Sluggy Mirror, but seeing how one didn't exist I when this approach. Using my software making a sluggy mirror would become easy, but I don't have the webspace for it now , but I might do it one day if I get Pete's permission etc.
Though as went throught the procedure of leech I decided that if I found a mirror would have only been so long before it was blocked. In the end I ftped the files down to my local disk and view them there
There are 3 classes that I use. The most important is the SluggyDate class. This generates the yymmdd date needed to access sluggy files. I also need to figure out when sunday was because special action would have to be taken. I found some code on the net to do this, I wish I could give the author credit, but alas I don't have records of who they were. Next is the Sluggy class itself. It does the real work of leeching. Then the SluggyHTML class generates HTML for easy viewing. I also wrote a shell script to handle the files in my webspace, so I would have been already to make a mirror.
Most the code is actually rather messy. Sorry about that but I trying making a well orgainzed version of the Sluggy class and it wouldn't work, and this one did so I use it. Similarly I did really care when I wrote SluggyHTML so I just make it functional, but nothing in this code is very complex. ( thanks to java ) Here is the source code for your consumption.
