I love Poorly Drawn Lines, but I never remember to check the site for updates. This small task server will periodically check for new comics and, if found, will then send a text alert. Because laughs.
It also fetches xkcd!
Requirements
- Fetch and parse XKCD json
- Fetch and parse PDL xml
- Store metadata for each source's most recent comic
- If comic is new, send text message
- Run as a scheduled task, rather than single-use
Thankfully, PDL and XKCD provide different formats. PDL has an RSS feed with ~10 most recent comics, whereas XKCD has an endpoint to retrieve JSON metadata for the single most recent comic. This provided opportunities to work with both JSON and XML parsing!