8 posts tagged with "metrontagger"

Monthly Statistics

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

• Users: 45
• Issues: 1,786
• Creators: 228
• Characters: 448

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Final Order Cutoff (FOC) Dates

With Diamond announcing they will stop printing their Previews, I had some comic industry people contact me about adding the Final Order Cutoff (FOC) dates to upcoming issue releases. With that information, users could use our API to create their pull lists. This was a fairly simple request, which won't affect most users (since my tools that import upcoming releases will handle it) and was added to the site on June 17th.

One thing I still need to decide on is, whether to add new releases that don't have there final cover dressing released (Marvel, in particular, tends to release them really late) or not. If this was done, I would need to modify my tools to make it easier to update the issue covers with the final version when it is released, and most likely clean the sites cover cache more frequently.

Darkseid / Metron-Tagger Release

I spent a bit of time this month refactoring Darkseid and Metron-Tagger which should make it easier maintain and give a bit of a performance improvements. If you are interested in the changes, they are here: Darkseid Release Notes & Metron-Tagger Release Notes

OpenCollective

If you would like to help keep the lights on at the project, we have an account at Open Collective to defray the servers costs and help with increasing future server capacity.

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

Monthly Statistics

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

• Users: 39
• Issues: 3,140
• Creators: 230
• Characters: 852

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

API Change

A new parameter, rating, was added to the issue endpoint and accepts the follow case-insensitive values:

• Unknown
• Everyone
• Teen
• Mature
• Teen Plus
• CCA

An example of its usage would be: https://metron.cloud/api/issue/?publisher_name=dynamite&rating=teen

Metron-Tagger

Released a new version of Metron-Tagger, which contains a couple of new features/changes:

• Digital Comics Renaming: When renaming a digital-only comic, Digital Chapter will be appended to the filename.
• Remove Non-Valid Metadata Option: Using the --remove-non-valid option with the --validate option will remove any comicinfo.xml that is not valid.
• Removed Oddball Rename Tokens: Removed the genre, story titles, language, critical rating, and story arc tokens from the renaming templates since they are not commonly used.

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

Monthly Statistics

During March and April the Metron Project added the following to its database:

• Users: 75
• Issues: 4,495
• Creators: 255
• Characters: 1,632

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

Digital Chapters

Recently a new series type, Digital Chapters, was added to Metron. This was to facilitate adding digital comics, like DC Comics Bombshells. This series type appends the word Digital to the series display name and adds Chapter to the issue display name. When adding Digital Chapters series, the print version should not be added as an associated seres, but added as reprints to the appropriate issues. For an example of this, please refer to this issue.

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

Monthly statistics

During February the Metron Project had a total of 5,635 issues added to its database during February bring the total number of issues to 112,135. We also had 65 new users join.

ComicTagger

Recently comictagger released the metron_talker plugin, but unfortunately it's got a few design flaws that is generating 2-4 times the number of API calls compared to other clients, and it's also downloading the cover for each issue, instead of using the issue's cover_hash exposed by the Metron API. The developers are working on addressing these issues, but if you are planning to tag a large number of comics we would appreciate it if you waited for a new release or use Metron-Tagger in the interim.

Server News

With the server load increase due to the comictagger bug, I've gone ahead and increased the CPU and RAM for the server and with any luck users shouldn't see a decrease in server quality of service.

Metron-Tagger

AJ Slater recently released a new library (comicfn2dict) for parsing comic filenames, and since the code for handling that in darkseid was fairly old and crusty it seemed like a good time to do a little work on Metron-Tagger. Some of the changes are as follows:

• comicfn2dict

  So, I switched over to using comicfn2dict for filename parsing, and did some testing on around 1,000 or so comics. Overall, it's performed as well as the old code and has the added benefit of being used by multiple projects.

• Improved Matching

  Spent some time improving comic matching by implementing the following changes:

  • Only use the series name and issue number when querying Metron. By doing this we are likely to get a result from Metron. Also, we are striping out any special characters (like ,, -, or &) from the series name.
  • Use the cover hash from Metron to verify the issue is correct, otherwise we'll ask the user for help.
  • Use existing ComicInfo.xml for matching. If a comic has already been tagged by comictagger (or Metron-Tagger) and has information to help identify the issue (like the Comic Vine ID), we'll use that before using the filename.

Miscellaneous

Right now, I'm thinking about making some changes to the API (like adding versioning), and if I do I'll ask the community for any suggestions of changes they'd like to see.

Issues Indexed

The Metron Project had a total of 7,816 issues added to its database during January bring the total number of issues to 106,500. I wish to give big thanks to everyone who has helped with the project. Thanks!

Universes Support

Universe support has been added to Metron, which will allow users to add Publisher's universes to Issues, Characters, and Teams. I've used information from a variety of sources to populate the initial universes, but I'm sure there is still a lot to be added.

To aid updating existing issues faster with this information I've created a Django Management Command to update a series' issues. To make a request to update a series with Universe information, please provide the necessary information in this discussion page.

Software Updates

New versions of Mokkari and Metron-Tagger have been released, which primarily deal with using Pydantic and adding Universe support.

Outstanding Bug Fixed

Fixed an outstanding bug where regular users were not able to add a new creator when adding a credit record to an Issue. Thanks to THElegend5 for reporting this bug!

Issues Indexed

The Metron Project had a total of 10,722 issues added to its database during December bring the total number of issues to 98,684. I wish to give big thanks to everyone who has helped with the project. Thanks!

2023 Database Statistics

We added the following number of entries during 2023:

• Users: 319
• Publishers: 33
• Series: 2,430
• Comics: 44,914
• Characters: 7,082
• Creators: 3,118
• Teams: 691
• Arcs: 521

HTMX and Streaming HTML

I'm playing around with using HTMX and Django's ability to stream HTML to improve the user experience. Basically, we'll load the static parts (like the footer, navbar, etc.) of the page templates as soon as possible, and then load the data as it becomes available and render its fragment of HTML. Not sure if this will be pushed to production or not until I do more testing, but it's something worth looking into.

Issues Indexed

Not much user-facing development was done in November, but 10,612 issues were added to the database bringing the total number of issues to 88,244. I wish to give big thanks to everyone who has helped with the project. Thanks!

2024 Tasks

I've started working on a list of items that I'm planning to work on in 2024. Here's a partial list:

• Upgrade Server

  Currently, the server is fairly underpowered (1 GiB Memory, 1 CPU, 25 GiB SSD, 1,000 GiB Transfer) but is able to handle the current load without any particular issues. Based on the current user growth rate, I'm guessing I'll finally need to upgrade sometime in 2024, I'm thinking a fairly minor bump should be sufficient (2 GiB Memory, 1CPU, 50 GiB SSD, 2,000 GiB Transfer)

• Container Deployment

  Before upgrading the server it makes sense to finally set up the project to use containers (preferably Podman) when deploying the website. If anyone wants to help with this, that would be awesome.

• Look into Open Collective for Future Funding

  Eventually it will make sense to look at setting up something like Open Collective to help with future server costs. Right now the server costs around $14 a month (not including annual domain name & email hosting costs) so it's not really an issue, but down the road I probably won't want to cover all the costs of the project myself.

  Glancing at the criteria needed for acceptance to the Open Source Collective, it looks like Metron meets most of them, except having 100 stars on Github. So, if you'd like to help the project, one easy way would be to star the repository.

• Manga / International Support

  It would be nice to make a final decision on whether to support Manga and Non-U.S. issues, right now I'm inclined not to but if we do add support it will necessitate some changes to the database for things like currencies, languages, and such.

I'm sure there will be other smaller items (like tweaking the site's css and such), but these are most items I'll be looking at in 2024. 🎉

New Indexed Issues Milestone

The Metron Project reached a milestone this month by having more than 77,000 issues added to its database. I wish to give big thanks to everyone who has helped with the project. Thanks!

Metron-Tagger v1.6.4

Duplicate Page Removal

Just released a new version of Metron-Tagger, which adds a new experimental feature of finding / removing duplicate pages in a directory of comics. The feature will get the hashes for all the pages of the comics in a directory, and then ask the user if the image should be removed from the comics. This is done by using the user's system image viewer to display the duplicate image. Once the user has reviewed all the duplicated images it will ask the user whether to write the changes to the comics and then prompt them if they also want to update the ComicInfo.xml (if it exists) for the page changes.

This feature most likely will work best when running on a weekly basis, instead of on a whole comic collection, since it's asking the user to review all the duplicate images before writing the changes. I'm planning on reworking this to make it more feasible to use on a large comic collection, but that is pretty far down on my TODO list (but if someone wants to work on this I'm more than willing to review a Pull Request).

Note: I've been using this for the last month and haven't had any issues, but if you plan on using this I would suggest backing up any files when using this initially, and verifying it works correctly for you since once the changes are written they can't be undone! 💣

Miscellaneous Maintenance

The rest of v1.6.4 changes are primarily developer-side changes updating the toolsets for Metron-Tagger.

Comic-Tagger

Comic-Tagger recently released their Metron-Talker plugin which adds support for tagging any comic with metadata from Metron.