3 posts tagged with "comicvine"

Ok, been fairly busy the last couple of months so naturally blogging has taken a back-burner. So, here's a summary of what's been going on the last few months.

Monthly Statistics

During August the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 41
• Issues: 1,377
• Creators: 147
• Characters: 346

During September the following was added:

• Users: 100
• Issues: 1,330
• Creators: 124
• Characters: 379

During October the following was added:

• Users: 51
• Issues: 1,996
• Creators: 122
• Characters: 740

Comic Vine Outage

Comic Vine went down at the end of September for about 6 days, so we saw an influx of new users which necessitated in increasing our server's capacity. One thing this episode brought to light out was the need for the project to accept donations for future infrastructure costs (since I'm currently covering the server costs).

To help us set this up it would be greatly appreciated if you could star the repository since one of the requirements to set up an account on Open Collective is to have 100 stars.

Server OS Upgrade

I had planned to upgrade the server in August, but y'know... life. Anyway, I'm tentatively planning to upgrade Metron's operating system on November 16th, so there might be some downtime (most likely a few hours) when I do that. I'll post a notification on the site for the week leading to the upgrade.

MetronInfo.xml

The last couple of months there has been a bunch of work done on finalizing the MetronInfo.xsd by Joe, AJ, Buried-In-Code and myself, and I believe there are just a couple of outstanding items that need a resolution. Once that is done, I'll write up a announcement blog post.

Anyway, that's all I've got for this month. Take care!

New Indexed Issues Milestone

The Metron Project reached a milestone today by having 65,000 issues added to its database. I wish to give big thanks to everyone who has helped with the project. Thanks!

POST API

Been spending the last few months working on a POST API to make it easier to add/update information on Metron. Currently it's only available to users with Adminstrators permissions, but later this year I'll look at the feasability of making it more readily available.

Comic Vine ID's

Another project I've been working on is adding Comic Vine identification numbers to the various resource items. This should help users match items between the two data sources. Currently, about 40% of the issues have been updated with this information and with any luck the majority of issues will be finished by the end of the month.

ComicTagger

One of the developers of Comic Tagger has been working on adding support for tagging digital comics with data from Metron, and hopefully in the next couple of months that merged.

So, one of the new projects I've been working on in my spare time is a new comic book xml schema called MetronInfo.

Currently, most applications use ComicInfo which originated from the ComicRack application, but due to it's history this format has some limitations like:

• Poor handling of data. For example, cover date information that is split into separate integer types, instead of just using a date type.
• Limited types metadata stored. For example, when tagging a comic book archive with an application like ComicTagger it would be useful to know where the metadata information was retrieved from (i.e. Comic Vine, GCD, Metron, etc.) and the resources identification number.
• Lack of documentation. The Anansi Project is working on improving this, tho.

For now, the Anansi Project is working on documenting and extending (non-breaking changes) the ComicInfo schema, but in my opinion that time spent would be better spent on creating a new format not tied to a dead application. Due to the fairly unstructured nature of comic book archives it's trivial to tag one with the existing ComicInfo format and also a new format. That way users who use applications that only support ComicInfo.xml can still use them, but also gives them the option to use applications that could support the MetronInfo format.

My goals for MetronInfo.xml are:

• Fix some of the deficiencies of the ComicInfo format.
• Add information to make it easier for Plex-like application to identify data (series, character, etc/) when importing comics into their application.
• Document the elements clearly so their use is not ambiguous.

Currently I'm working right now on finalizing the new format, and would appreciate any help or feedback from the comic book community in this. Feel free to leave suggestions either at the Discussions Page or contact use over on Matrix.

Once the new format is finalized I plan on writing a tool that will create a MetronInfo.xml file for any existing comic book archive that was tagged with ComicTagger or Metron-Tagger, and also retrieve any missing data from the source of information (Metron or Comic Vine).