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I have a web site which embeds the Daily Dilbert comic strip by parsing it from the RSS feed that dilbert.com publishes, but said website is SSL encrypted, and the image as published is not. This triggers a mixed content warning in Internet Explorer.

I don't want to have to pull it down once a day and serve it locally if I can help - does anyone have a link to a publicly available daily Dilbert which I can fetch with an SSL (https) URL?

Edit: I hadn't thought of proxying it myself (thanks splattne!) which solves it neatly:

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/dilbert-proxy/
    RewriteRule ^/dilbert-proxy/(.*)$ http://dilbert.com/$1 [P]
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Are you legaly allowed to redistribute the comic? – Troggy♦ Jul 21 '09 at 20:08
I feel that displaying it off their site (consuming their public RSS) is better manners than saving a copy and redistributing. – crb Jul 21 '09 at 20:36
65 views and not one of you thought it was a concise and well written question worthy of an upvote? ;) – crb Jul 21 '09 at 20:38
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I would strongly argue from their terms of use (dilbert.com/terms) that it is a result of standard search engine or internet browser usage linking to the original. It is arguably non standard to embed (as it is non trivial to do), and clearly illegal to copy and display/redistribute your own copy. – malach Jul 27 '09 at 13:59
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Thanks, I have e-mailled them to clarify. There are a lot of widgets that display the Daily Dilbert comic on the web, and while that doesn't necessarily make what I am doing here any more right, it does lean towards 'acceptable' or 'we turn a blind eye'. – crb Jul 27 '09 at 20:24
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2 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Let's pretend you've got the permission from Scott Adams or whoever owns the rights of the Dilbert strips.

You could do some reverse proxying, creating a rule for a fictive URL on your site, let's say a request

https://www.example.com/dilbert/strip.gif

which triggers your reverse proxy mechanism to fetch the image from the dilbert.com site

http://www.dilbert.com/..../strip.gif

and sending the response from your server with the content fetched from the Dilbert server. This way you can keep the SSL connection, because it's transparent for the user.

Depending on your platform you'll have to see your options for using a revery proxy mechanism.

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+1 Now we're thinking. This is Apache2 on Debian (was tossing up between serverfault and superuser for the question). – crb Jul 21 '09 at 20:37
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up vote 6 down vote

Unless you have permission from the site owners at Daily Dilbert, I'd suggest doing exactly that - make a local copy and serve it yourself. Serving the image on your page off their servers is bad web manners.

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...though to copy the image one may also need permission. – Arjan Jul 21 '09 at 19:36
That is exactly what their RSS feed does. I am simply a feed reader displaying that that, minus the other n-1 days. – crb Jul 21 '09 at 20:36
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No, you're not. Their RSS feed is handled by feedburner.com and I guess there's a reason for that. – innaM Jul 30 '09 at 9:27
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