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Adade Cartoons blog - How it works?

I'm a great fan of Madhi's Adade Cartoons published on http://www.dinamani.com/. Madhi has been tooning for a long while and has a great sense of humor. I love his cartoons on politics. He has also released a book on collection of his cartoons.

Everyday, I used to visit Dinamani.com to read Madhi's cartoons. But I found it difficult to navigate and access the cartoons. You got to visit the homepage, click on the cartoons link from the navigation bar to open up a list of latest cartoons and click on each link to see the cartoons. I'd been reluctantly doing this for some time till I learnt that Yahoo Pipes can make my job easier.

After learning to create Yahoo pipes, I created this pipe which scrapes the Dinamani cartoons page and outputs a RSS feed of the Adade cartoons. I subscribed to the RSS feed in Google Reader and accessed the cartoons within the reader. I would've satisfied with this approach, if Dinamani.com had been archiving the cartoons. But the list is replaced everyday with new cartoons and links to old items are gone, though the images are still hosted on Dinamani server. I also learnt that Yahoo Pipes shows only the live items and there is no option to store feed history.

Before I gave up the effort to create a directory for Madhi's cartoons, I came across a discussion thread that suggests a solution to store the feed history. I couldn't succeed with the online tools DabbleDB and Dapper.net mentioned in the forum and had to use the FeedBurner instead.

My approach for storing the feed history goes this way,

1. Burn the output feed of the Yahoo Pipe in FeedBurner
2. Create a blog in Blogger and enable the email posting option under Settings->Email. Opt to keep the email posts as drafts. Note down the "Mail-To-Blogger" email address.
3. Subscribe yourself to the feed in FeedBurner, by specifying your Gmail address. Create a filter in Gmail to forward alert mails from FeedBurner to the "Mail-To-Blogger" email address. Received emails will eventually become a draft in the blog.
4. Manually edit the draft and remove the FeedBurner links to subscribe/unsubscribe. Provide appropriate title and labels.
5. Save the cartoon image on your computer and upload it to the blog post. Change the img tag's source to point to the newly uploaded image. Remember, the uploaded image is added to a album in your Picasa account.
6. Publish the post.

Those who dont want the manual intervention in step#4 can opt for Dapper.net's email service, but mind you Dapper sends email only in plain text format. Or you can choose the "Publish" option in step#2, which will directly publish the email content as posts. The cons of this approach are, post title will be the same, FeedBurner subscription links also appear in the post and any visitor can unsubscribe you from the FeedBurner subscription.

By keeping my Gmail account in loop, I will be notified as when new items are available and can edit the drafts and publish the post. This data flow diagram explains better,

Not to mention that this blog is a tribute to Madhi and Dinamani.com.

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