Peter's Blog

Urban has a recent post that reminded me about the Warcraft sig generator. (UPDATE: now here. Rest of article not updated). This creates sigs like these:

UPDATE: the signature generator seems to be heavily loaded and struggles to reliably download images. If you see nothing here then that is why.

UPDATE2: Pookypoo has long black flowing hair, he's not a bald red-head.

UPDATE3: I figured out how to download the data from the armory here.

They are magical because you only have to give it the name of a character and the server and it sucks the rest of the details out of the armory. They should even be updated as the character levels up.

I had tried this before on this blog but had been thwarted because the sig generator creates links that are on port 8080 and these cannot always be downloaded from behind a firewall. This can cause the web page to never completely download or to timeout.

However, while complaining to urban about it today I had the bright idea of running a bash script on my site5 server to download the images there using a cron job and then linking to them normally. Here is the bash script:

#"/usr/bin/bash

cd /home/site5username/public_html/petersblog/images
curl -s "http://wow.tachyonsix.com.nyud.net:8080/armory/sig.php/578013jhECG.png" > pooky.png
curl -s "http://wow.tachyonsix.com.nyud.net:8080/armory/sig.php/577975QHCan.png" > maevyn.png

The cron job can run once a night.

My first attempt at this script used wget to download the images but the png files it created were corrupt in some way so I switched to curl.

Unfortunately these sigs are quite wide and there is no nice place to stick them in the header or side bar of the site so I've put them on the tips page. In fact this save me a small maintenance job in having to update the character descriptions there.

The next problem may be forcing the browser to use new versions of the images every day and not cached ones but lets hope that apache has that covered.