Castle Paradox

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2011 8:17 am Post subject: Mirror-friendly game index

I haven't been running the gamelist mirror in a long time. Even though it only ran once a month, I know it put a strain on the site (and on mine too, I think)

I would love to be able to update a mirror of the game list incrementally. Over at Slime Salad, Mogri implemented a mirror-friendly dump of the gamelist, and I was wondering if you would be willing to add a similar mirroring tool here to CastleParadox?

The format Mogri used looks like this:

TMC · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2011 10:29 am Post subject:

I couldn't help myself!

http://tmc.castleparadox.com/gamelist.py

Aside from some very minor playing around with PHP, this is the first time I've ever done anything like this.
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Inferior Minion · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2011 11:19 am Post subject:

Haha, I was just finishing that up myself. TMC, you forgot to allow for JPEG screenshots Happy

James, does this work for you? I've annotated the list elements using the title attribute for clarity: http://castleparadox.com/gamelist_mirror.php

Cheers,

~IM
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TMC · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2011 12:11 pm Post subject:

Opps, that regular expression was just a placeholder!

You forgot the most important part: the mtimes!

Was linking to downloadcounter.php accidental?
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

Inferior Minion · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2011 1:01 pm Post subject:

Thanks for pointing out the missing time information. I was stripping out as much information from the game list page as I could. Also, if you look at the download link, you'll notice it has &mirror=true in the URL. This allows the download page to do the filename translation while skipping the actual download count incrementing.

Cheers,

~IM
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TMC · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 2:09 pm Post subject:

I'm confused. downloadcounter.php?game=X&mirror=true doesn't download the game, it just leads to a broken version of the game listing, where the download link isn't tagged by mirror=true. Or is the download count incremented by something like an onclick action which isn't present on that page? Anyway I assume the mirror script would prefer a direct download link: would downloading via that increment the download counter?
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 2:43 pm Post subject:

I guess I can strip out the html with a regular expression, but multiline regexes are a huge pain. For my own purposes this would be much easier if it was a minimalist plain text format.

Inferior Minion · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 3:43 pm Post subject:

Thanks TMC. I forgot that I was using a test page when creating the game list dump. My test page would link to a test download counter page (see FFH's download counter for an example: http://castleparadox.com/downloadcounter.php?game=37 - may take a minute to load). I had updated download.php to support a "mirror" url query parameter so that you would get back a proper filename, not #.zip, while avoiding incrementing the download count. I've fixed the issues with the links in the page.

James, I've made the page output plain text wrapped in pre tags by default.

Cheers,

IM
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TMC · Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 7:13 am Post subject:

Oh! I had mistaken that table on downloadcounter.php for some kind of misformatting of the download stats histogram. That's pretty interesting. I wonder what could be mined out of those logs... if you wanted to find correlations (ie "also downloaded"), you would want to use the original data with more precise timestamps...
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"It is so great it is insanely great."