Comic Strips

[paul.castaneda@dahlplumbing.com]

Well, sitting here one day, I was trying to figure out a way to "spice" up our signage and came to the conclusion the an RSS/XML feed of comic strips would probably be the ticket. After a bit of research I came across some and tried them out. Unfortunate, though the feed itself worked, the strip itself would not display. After some dialogue with Mike Strand and some research by him, he relayed to me that Strandvision is set up only to display images with a resolution, pixel height/width of at least 150 pixels. What I was trying to use had a max. of 60 pixels. Back to the drawing board I go and came across a great site that allowed me to pull off this great coup d'etat. This site, located at http://comics.com/ , proved to be a wonderful place to find the most popular strips and made it easy to get them displayed. I'll outline the basics here for you.

1.) Once at the site, you must register a user name and password.
2.) On the home page, to the right and next to the Search box, you'll find the link the simply says, RSS...click it.
3.) Click on ADD/EDIT RSS.
4.) On the PICK YOUR FAVORITE COMICS page, choose the comic strips you desire.
5.) Click SUBMIT at the bottom of the page.
6.) On the next page click I'M DONE.
7.) Back on the home page click RSS, then ADD/EDIT RSS again.
8.) Back on the PICK YOUR FAVORITE COMICS page, you'll the RSS feed link in the upper right hand corner. Cut and paste this link into your RSS/XML feed page for your signage. Set the setting for that page the way you like, click save and your done!

After some consternation and some dialogue with Mike Strand, we here at Dahl of Santa Fe have found that these comic strips have added a nice enhancement and keeps the customers a bit more focused on the screens. The strips do update every day. I have also found that I was able to choose several strips, paste the very same feed link into 6 different RSS/XML feed pages on our signage and each time the next page displays it is the next strip in line, meaning that the link doesn't just display the first one each time a new page comes around.

Give it a shot, customers dig it!

[mjstrand]

Thanks for the excellent detail on this Paul. It is nice to see the innovative ways that digital signage can be used!