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Breaking Bunny
How to get past a bot-blocker
Issue: 24.5 (September/October 2026)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 27,347
Starting Page Number: 24
Article Number: 24504
Resource File(s):
project24504.zip Updated: 2026-08-31 13:08:50
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
Longtime readers of
xDev might remember that in 2011 I published a Xojo app for downloading comics from various internet sites (https://xdevmag.com/browse/10.1/10007/). It is basically a data-scraper app that visits several comic sites, downloads my list of comics as image files, and saves them on Dropbox for me to read later on my iPad by simply scrolling through the images in that folder.Because the app runs automatically early every morning, part of my wake-up routine is to start my day by reading all my comics, conveniently already downloaded for me.
Of course, comic sites don't like data-scraper apps. They want me to visit the site manually and see their ads. I find that tedious—not because of the ads, so much, but because I only want to view
my list of comics. That's difficult when a site has many I don't care about and not all I want are available on the same site.Because sites don't want me data-scraping, they change their HTML periodically, and my algorithm that searches their page to find the actual comic image will break. Because of that, I have to tweak it occasionally.
Therefore, I wrote my Comic Downloader app using XojoScripts to do the actual parsing of the HTML. That way, my main app can stay the same, and I only have to edit the script if a site breaks my code.
This app worked great for nearly a decade, other than editing the scripts every now and then.
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