*** MARCH CHALLENGE: Not Your Father's Random Dungeon ***

[Badger]

I believe its five days to the last day of the month.. in this case... the 26th...its in the challenge rules located here:http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=503

[Redrobes]

Hi guys, Earlier I posted a link to an overview of this months entries...

The thumbnail link

...which I have been trying to keep up to date. I said that I would try to make a CGI dynamic page to gather up all the entries automatically and present them. I have been trying to do that and I have a script now.

The problem is that it takes so long to click on a challenge thread and get the results back that after 16 of them plus the time to search, download the image, rescale and present it, it takes too long to run as a CGI script.

So what I am intending to do from next month onwards is to run this script locally to myself and upload all of the thumbs that it generates for me. The script will take a few minutes to run and I may even be able to get it to ftp the results up for me too. Thats going to be easier than me clicking on 16 threads now and again to check I haven't missed any.

So in the future I am proposing that I will make a list of entries locally but if you want the script to put the latest WIP image into the thumbs page then just put...

### Latest WIP ###

as the last thing in your post, before the image and it will find the last one and use the next image as the current thumb. I have done this on my challenge entry this month for example.

I can make the script available to Arcana or any admin who wants to look at it.

[pyrandon]

Redrobes, I'm a tech idiot, but if this script of which you speak works the way I think it will work, that's awesome! Thank you!!

I'll leave it to Arcana and my other betters to decide what/how to utilize all your hard work, but I see great things in the future!

[Redrobes]

It logs itself in and fetches a page which contains lines like these...

### New Challenge Entry:Redrobes,1604
### New Challenge Entry:GamerPrinter,1588
### New Challenge Entry:NeonKnight,1611

...somewhere in it. The numbers represent the thread id's. Then it goes through the threads looking for that latest WIP thing and grabs the link to the next image. The script loads up a database and checks if the attachment id is the same as the current thumbnail and if not then it fetches that image and rescales it to thumb size and saves/overwrites it out and updates the database file. Then it writes out the web page bit for that entry too.

So you start with a file or webpage containing a list of entries and the usual set of entry threads as normal. The list could be the challenge description like this thread with a post containing this list or each person could post and add themselves. You might have a database file from a previous run also.

In the end you have a database text file of thumbnail attachment id's, a list of thumbnail PNG files and the web page linking the thumbnails like that of the link above. The latter two being required / uploaded for the web page view.

Maybe if it was run on the same machine that was serving the files then it would (or could be made to) take the files locally from the HDD and therefore not have to go via apache + net and then be fast enough to run as a CGI. This I would grant you would be a tricky thing to get right. So running locally to me/an admin (i.e. across the net) and uploading the results is much easier.