Hey grubbiv, the auction tracker is a great idea. In fact that's what AuctionSieve was originally going to be! Dunno if some of this info might be of use to you...

When I first started trolling ebay for D&D in the dim dark past I thought it would be great to keep track of all the auctions and arrive at an average price for things. So I started coding...

What I ended up with would let you put in an item number and it would go and scrape the item page and then try to do two things :
- try and figure out the condition of the item (searching for phrases like "near mint", "good" etc and count up how many times they occurred and arrive at a recommendation - ie it would autoselect the condition in a dropdown box for you to confirm)
- try and categorise the item - I had the concept of keyphrases like "AD&D" "Q1" "The Demonweb Pits" - it would try and match as many things as possible to figure out where to categorise things

As a second step it would then create a web of pages which would categorise things according to an algorithm that figured out the most common keyphrases. So, for example, it would automatically see that the most common keyphrases were "D&D" and "AD&D" and the top web page would have links to those 2 sub categories. And then you could follow the links to more fine grained results. At every step it would display the average price for all the sub results. And broken down by condition! Uhmmm it's a bit hard to explain actually but it was way cool.

As part of my trolling I started writing some code that would grab all the results and then basically do a grep -v with a list of keywords I specified in another txt file. But that was really painful and I envisioned a way of adding to that list of killwords merely by highlighting the text and pressing a button.... and thus the idea for AuctionSieve was born.

So I took 2 months off to code it.... Can you believe version 1.0.0 only allowed you to grab categories - no searching! But I digress......

Of course price history stuff finally found it's way into AuctionSieve but in a *much* much more watered down version from my uber price tracker/scraper.

I've always had plans to beef it up and, what's more, make it peer to peer - so everyone contributes to a central database. But at my rate I won't get around to that for years.

Not only that but here's the kicker - the ebay developer program terms and conditions disallow you from keeping auction history. Yep, in converting to using the ebay api I may have to kill off the Price History part of AuctionSieve.

So what I'm saying is, go for it! I'd love to see it implemented.

Nev

Hi everyone,

I will be away for the next 7 to 10 days. Any requests for new membership / editing status please forward to grubbiv until I get back.

Cheers, Jeremy

Table of Contents for Periodicals

There's some new markup available on the wiki for creating tables of contents for periodicals.  Take a look at Sorcerer's Apprentice 14 to see it in use.

It has two advantages.  The first is that the contents will automatically be added to an index covering all issues of the periodical.  The second is that the contents and the full index are displayed in a sortable table.  Click on the column heading to sort by that column.

The markup looks like this:

<TOC>
P:Sorcerer's Apprentice
I:14

S:Fiction
22^From the Tree of Time^{{CL|Fred Saberhagen}}
35^The Sword and The Curse^{{CL|Lee Duigon}}

S:Articles
13^Devil Games? Nonsense!^{{CL|Michael Stackpole}}^{{CL|Ken St. Andre}}
19^Ship of the Skies^{{CL|John Sapienza|John T. Sapienza, Jr.}}
...
</TOC>

The first two lines indicate the name of the periodical and the issue number.

The S:Fiction line starts a section called "Fiction", and the contents of the section follow.  Each line contains a page number, article title, and up to three authors, separated by carets (^).  If there are multiple authors, they are separated from each other by carets.

If the index page for the periodical doesn't exist, create a page (supposing the periodical is "Sorcerer's Apprentice") at

 Index:Sorcerer's_Apprentice

The following markup needs to be put in the page

<PeriodicalIndex>Sorcerer's Apprentice</PeriodicalIndex>

That is all.

I must admit that the format is growing on me. When I first saw it I thought 'Hmmm', but now that I have used it I love it. The amazing thing is, we will automatically build complete magazine series indexes by using it.

In the case of Dragon magazine, we are scanning the contents page anyway, so a user can quickly check the contents original format (which we have been replicating in our uploads so far.

I haven't tried converting a page yet, so I am not sure how much work it will take to covert what we have already done.

I did one  - http://wiki.acaeum.com/wiki/Dragon_81

Let me know if it's too busy.

EDITED FEB 4,2009 -
Up to two whole issues now.

Does it take a while for the index page to update?
Or am I coding something wrong (again)?

Ahh, yes.....Page Cache.

(I knew there was atechnical term for it.)

Thanks.

HermitFromPluto wrote:That was an impressive lot of work you did restructuring the Category pages yesterday grubbiv. Looks good!

Here's the changes I made:

Genres

Added a few more genres.  We're using a simplified version of the scheme in Heroic Worlds.  Added a Genre link to the sidebar.

Game Types

Created these categories: Role Playing Games, Board Games, Miniatures Rules.  There are links to them on the Games page.

Horizontal Nav Bars

A goal is to have four basic pages for each game: (1) the autogenerated list of all products for the game, (2) a hand-edited gallery of thumbnails, (3) a product list generated by the auction tracker with average price info in a sortable list, and (4) an About page with mostly text about the game.

A gray horizontal nav bar has been devised to make it easy to navigate between the pages.  See an example at The FantasyTrip.  The markup is

  {{GameNav|The Fantasy Trip|gallery}}

The 2nd argument indicates the name of the game, and the 3rd argument indicates the page (articles, gallery, prices, about) the nav is being used on so that link to that page can be grayed out.

I'm also adding the horizontal nav to the pages for products that belong to the game.  On the Melee page you'll see this markup:

  {{ArticleNav|The Fantasy Trip}}

For the periodicals, the prices page is replaced with an index page, so there are different templates to use:

  {{PeriodicalNav|Sorcerer's Apprentice|gallery}}
  {{IssueNav|Sorcerer's Apprentice}}

Most of the game item pages and periodical issue pages are still missing the {{ArticleNav|...}} and {{IssueNav|...}} tags.  Feel free to add them.

Traveller

If someone wanted to help finish off the classic Traveller by GDW, here is the list of needed items:

Starter Traveller
Beltstrike
Striker
Tarsus
Book 7: Merchant Prince
Book 8: Robots
Atlas of the Imperium
Aliens Handout
The Spinward Marches Campaign
The Traveller Adventure
Alien Realms
Azhanti High Lightning
Dark Nebula
Fifth Frontier War
Imperium
Invasion: Earth
Best of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, Volume 1
Best of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, Volume 2
Best of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, Volume 3
Best of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, Volume 4

 I'm back!

Hey everyone,

I am heading back up to my PhD-writing mountain hideaway.

Anyone wanting editing status between now and Tuesday 7 April, please PM grubbiv.