back to the future
February 2, 2011
Just a brief note to say that I haven’t abandoned all hope of getting this site going again. Even though I’m not playing MMOs at the moment, it seems a shame to just leave everything sit idle. My basic infrastructure runs without too much effort, so it is no great problem to refresh the data every couple of months.
The main obstacle is that Blizz is now serving the up-to-date data from battle.net in HTML format rather than XML. My page-scraping code needs to change to cope with that. Fortunately however the Blizz engineers are serving up valid XHTML, which means that XPath expressions can still be used to extract the data we need.
If I’ve been a good little engineer then only my XPaths need to change and nothing else…
There is a danger that the XPath paths can become more than a bit baroque because they have to navigate through all the HTML markup to get to the data nodes, although there are tricks to get the XPath engine to do a lot of the searching.
Anybody looking for inspiration on how to parse the battle.net XHTML should check out these posts by a geek blooger called Kastang. That’s the method I’ll be using when I get back to all this.
February 3, 2011 at 4:53 am
For the moment, I believe all the old XML feeds are still working. I think the only thing missing right now is how a player chose to reforge his/her gear.
For my own stuff, I don’t need reforging so I’m resisting the XHTML parsing path. They’ve mentioned that they intend to friendlier feeds back up at some point so I’m just going to wait it out until those show up or they turn off the old XML altogether.
February 3, 2011 at 10:18 am
The vibe in cyberspace is that a lot of calls to the old armoury fail. Are you finding that? There are a couple of discussion threads – which Google will find – that made me pessimistic about using the old site on a large scale.
February 3, 2011 at 10:25 am
I’ve only really played around with the achievements feed recently and I haven’t noticed a ton of problems with it. Although now that I look at my code, I don’t really have any monitoring for armory errors so I’m not sure if I’ve been seeing a lot of failures or not. I’ll see if I can add some better handling of armory errors to find out if it’s stable or not.
Only app I have right now that talks to the armory is this: http://raidbots.com/achievements/
February 3, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Let me know what you find – if its still up-to-date and usable I may as well stick with it.
February 4, 2011 at 1:42 am
Right now, everything Armory related on my website is working, although it was really sketchy the first few days after Cataclysm hit. If you visit the old pages in IE, you see the “we’ve moved” bit, but if you view source, you’ll find the XML is still in tact.
I have had issues with new items showing up if you go directly to item-info.xml, but searching for them appears to work.
February 4, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for that. I’ll do a test run against the old armoury soon and see what happens.
February 18, 2011 at 7:34 am
The XML Feeds seem to work for all Armories (US, EU, CN, TW, KR) as far as I can tell (armoryminer.com, although I’m using a specific User-Agent ID for my crawler). Would love to see your reports updated, greate site!
March 11, 2011 at 9:35 pm
I think I speak for countless bloggers and players when I express my profound gratitude for your efforts in taking the time to keep updating the Armory Datamine project.
Take care!
March 12, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Thanks for those kind words. I’m getting closer to a time when I may be able to do a Cataclysm update.
March 30, 2011 at 6:34 am
Sweet, looking forward to seeing any new stuff here.
April 18, 2011 at 5:32 pm
I used to datamine raid and dungeon stats on my site, I still cant figure out how to get those stats with the new armory. Sad
you have any luck?
April 19, 2011 at 10:28 am
I haven’t looked very closely at the new armoury data. Still trying to free up some time for that.
May 4, 2011 at 2:38 pm
When are you going to update the information on the site? I really like your site because the information was very useful to me. The information helped me level my toons.
May 12, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Character/Guild/Arena Team APIs Preview:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2516991705?page=1#1