🎲 Daily Random xkcd 🎲

📖 About

This repository automatically generates a daily random xkcd comic and serves it as an RSS feed. Each day, a new comic is fetched, formatted, and made available for subscription. Users can configure RSS.app to send email notifications whenever a new comic is available in the feed. It also features a fun xkcd-themed 404 error page that showcases a random comic in a playful layout.

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🌟 Features

• 🕒 Daily random xkcd comic fetching.
• 📡 Generates an RSS feed that updates with new comic details.
• 🔄 Tracks seen comics to avoid duplicates via seen_comics.json.
• 📧 RSS.app email notifications for new comics.
• 🎨 Custom xkcd 404 HTML page showcasing a random comic in a unique format.

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⚙️ How It Works

1. 🕔 Daily Trigger: A GitHub Actions workflow is triggered every day at 8:00 AM UTC+3 to run a Python script (generate_rss.py).
2. 📥 Random Comic Fetch: The script fetches a random comic from the xkcd API, ensuring it hasn’t been seen before.
3. 📝 XML Generation: Comic details are formatted as XML and saved to docs/xkcd_feed.xml.
4. 🗂️ Seen Comics Tracking: The comics are tracked in seen_comics.json to avoid repeats.
5. 🚀 RSS Hosting: The RSS feed is hosted on GitHub for easy access by RSS.app.
6. 📧 Email Notifications: RSS.app monitors the feed and sends email alerts when a new comic is available.
7. 💡 404 Page: A Python script generates an xkcd-themed 404 page with a random comic.

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🔗 Links

• 🚧 404 HTML Page
  A beautifully styled 404 page demonstrating an XKCD comic.

• 📡 RSS Comic Feed
  An RSS feed of random XKCD comics, formatted in XML.

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🛠️ Setup Instructions

Note: Make sure to fork and enable GitHub Actions to automate daily comic fetching.

1. Fork this repository to your GitHub account.
2. Enable GitHub Actions in your forked repository.
3. Set up RSS.app:
   • Create a new RSS feed alert for the URL
   • Configure the email notifications based on your preferences.
4. Enjoy daily xkcd emails and check the latest comic each day!
5. Access the 404 Page

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📂 Files

• generate_rss.py: Python script to fetch a random xkcd comic, track seen comics, and generate the RSS feed.
• generate_html_404_style_xkcd.py: Python script to generate the random xkcd-themed 404 page.
• seen_comics.json: JSON file that tracks comics to prevent repeats.
• docs/rss/xkcd_feed.xml: RSS feed with the latest comic details.
• docs/404/xkcd_404_style.html: HTML file for the 404 page.
• .github/workflows/update_xkcd_rss_feed.yaml: GitHub Actions workflow to update the RSS feed daily.
• .github/workflows/update_html_404.yaml: GitHub Actions workflow to update the 404 page daily.

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📝 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

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🙏 Acknowledgements

• Thanks to xkcd for their amazing comics.
• Shoutout to GitHub Actions for making automation easy.
• Thanks to RSS.app for helping automate RSS-to-email services.

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📬 Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to open an issue in this repository!