Shameless website plug!
I've recently put my Speccy dedicated site live after finally getting around to making a half decent attempt at a web site design for it, so I thought this was as good a time as any to plug it. I've had it in my sig for while on here, but never bleated on about it - until now!
If you're not aware, over the last 15 years or so I've been slowly building a database that grew up from my slow purging of the Speccy Sensations 2 CD (mid 90's) into a massive text file; to transferring the data and contents of the WOS CD of 1998 into an Access database. It was completely awful but I amazingly got a job VB programming and learnt to database program properly (hah!). I re-jigged the database to be properly structured in related tables (rather than 1 table!), got online and downloaded Martijn's (of WOS) SGD files and wrote an importer to get his data into my database.
A year or so later I released that database along with a program I'd written in VB to act as a frontend to various emulators. It was to all intents and purposes, crap! There's a version of it on WOS called inRetroSpect and it almost shames me to put my name to it!! In my defence I was an apprentice VB programmer at the time ;-)
I realised soon after releasing it that I needed something else to keep my interest and I'd always maintained an unhealthy knowledge of reviews in the mags of the time (esp Crash). So I thought of adding the reviews to my database, and boy, did I not realise at the time what a massive job that would be! It has literally been hundreds, if not thousands of man hours...
I started by purging Matthew Wilsons excellent Crash online website http://www.crashonline.org.uk/ but it was when Mort's Crash CD's came out that I could start getting every review into the database in earnest by various helpful Windows apps that I wrote. I slowy but surely began OCR'ing all of the reviews from the scans into PDF's (as the structure of the page was maintained), ripping the text from them and storing the text in the database in various tables so that they could be searched upon with T-SQL queries.
That's brought us up to date. The Access database is periodically imported into SQL Server for the purposes of the website.
It's my intention in the very near future to write a web service so that anyone can query the database and get the review text into their own app/website by consuming the said web service. Please feel free to HTTP request/screen scrape what's currently there and use the text in your own apps. Might be better to wait for the web service as it'll be much easier!!
Anyway, please jump on and let me know what you think. The designs okay-ish at the moment without relying to heavily on css just yet whilst I get the content in there. There's a search facility (which will shortly be greatly enhanced with the ability to search for scores (as in the Crash percentages)) and other drop downs to quickly get at the data. On each game there is a comments/scoring facility on each title which I'd love folks to use as it's interesting to find out the average scores over a broad spectrum. There's also a stats page.
If anyone has any comments/wishes/complaints/etc, please use the Contact or post on this thread which I'll periodically watch. I would really appreciate some feedback of either positive or negative slant!
Incidentally, I was quite shocked after putting it live last week that the reviews/games had over 3000 hits within that time. That was unexpected, I seriously only expected a few dozen!!
If you're not aware, over the last 15 years or so I've been slowly building a database that grew up from my slow purging of the Speccy Sensations 2 CD (mid 90's) into a massive text file; to transferring the data and contents of the WOS CD of 1998 into an Access database. It was completely awful but I amazingly got a job VB programming and learnt to database program properly (hah!). I re-jigged the database to be properly structured in related tables (rather than 1 table!), got online and downloaded Martijn's (of WOS) SGD files and wrote an importer to get his data into my database.
A year or so later I released that database along with a program I'd written in VB to act as a frontend to various emulators. It was to all intents and purposes, crap! There's a version of it on WOS called inRetroSpect and it almost shames me to put my name to it!! In my defence I was an apprentice VB programmer at the time ;-)
I realised soon after releasing it that I needed something else to keep my interest and I'd always maintained an unhealthy knowledge of reviews in the mags of the time (esp Crash). So I thought of adding the reviews to my database, and boy, did I not realise at the time what a massive job that would be! It has literally been hundreds, if not thousands of man hours...
I started by purging Matthew Wilsons excellent Crash online website http://www.crashonline.org.uk/ but it was when Mort's Crash CD's came out that I could start getting every review into the database in earnest by various helpful Windows apps that I wrote. I slowy but surely began OCR'ing all of the reviews from the scans into PDF's (as the structure of the page was maintained), ripping the text from them and storing the text in the database in various tables so that they could be searched upon with T-SQL queries.
That's brought us up to date. The Access database is periodically imported into SQL Server for the purposes of the website.
It's my intention in the very near future to write a web service so that anyone can query the database and get the review text into their own app/website by consuming the said web service. Please feel free to HTTP request/screen scrape what's currently there and use the text in your own apps. Might be better to wait for the web service as it'll be much easier!!
Anyway, please jump on and let me know what you think. The designs okay-ish at the moment without relying to heavily on css just yet whilst I get the content in there. There's a search facility (which will shortly be greatly enhanced with the ability to search for scores (as in the Crash percentages)) and other drop downs to quickly get at the data. On each game there is a comments/scoring facility on each title which I'd love folks to use as it's interesting to find out the average scores over a broad spectrum. There's also a stats page.
If anyone has any comments/wishes/complaints/etc, please use the Contact or post on this thread which I'll periodically watch. I would really appreciate some feedback of either positive or negative slant!
Incidentally, I was quite shocked after putting it live last week that the reviews/games had over 3000 hits within that time. That was unexpected, I seriously only expected a few dozen!!