Announcement

**cavalcade** · 10-01-2008, 11:16

I'm all for hacking together an app, but why not use gamestracker.co.uk?

**Chunky** · 10-01-2008, 11:31

I don't disagree that sites like gamestracker and findgames are useful, and i used them both before writing this app. However, the reason that i moved away from them is that they are just too slow.

A simple example from the recent updates on gamestracker is their prices for DiRT at Powerplay - they report it dropping to ?17.49 at 09 Jan 04:54, whereas my program first reported it at 08 Jan 10:12, a full 18 hours earlier. The same can be said across other games, and i'm afraid 18 hours just doesn't cut it - look at Command and Conquer for example which dropped to ?10.98 for a matter of hours, and there is no mention of that drop on gamestracker.

**cavalcade** · 10-01-2008, 11:59

Hmm, fair point. I hadn't really considered that.

**Chunky** · 10-01-2008, 12:30

The main incident that caused me to create it was that play.com dropped Halo 3 to £19.99 on December 3rd, for about an hour. Wish i'd have got that, the cheapest price for it at the moment is £32.99.

**egparadigm** · 10-01-2008, 13:15

I'd be happy to help - the gamestracker-type websites are pretty poor at keeping accurate records. But surely what you need is away of automatically finding titles in website catalogues, so you don't need to enter them manually. How does gamestracker get it's info?

**babs** · 10-01-2008, 13:38

If there are any php bods in here I dare say they could knock you up a very quick webpage with a form on it which allows you to enter the game name, system and then just paste the urls direct from the sites.

Maybe using something like the function substr to return the $$ you need after it's found the part it needs from the url. For example it could just be a do/while loop which extracts the characters one by one it finds after ".uk/" (using Game as an example) until it reaches "/". All it'd need to do then is send you an email with the created code page to paste into your program.

Am I over complicating things here? I think I might be

Besides, we'd still need a php-savvy bod to make the page, mine is very basic :|

**Chunky** · 10-01-2008, 13:46

It's getting hold of the URL's in the first place though, i could easily knock up an app that will parse the URL's and output what i need, the issue is more that i don't have time to trawl all the website all the time. Plus i don't know what games people want me to look for - all the games i want are being tracked

**babs** · 10-01-2008, 14:06

That's what I mean though, you could create a simple page hosted anywhere which lets people copy/paste the URLs into a form, then dumps an email to you with the XML formatted just as you need it.

Announcement

Bargain Hunting - Help !

Bargain Hunting - Help !

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment