When I started writing this, I thought, "Sic, not another post on duels...I think there are other sites I should check out." But with the widget duels widget nearing completion, I though I should show it off to people. Putting the widget on my blog looks cool, and all of my friends are impressed with the XP and points I have.
Here is how my blog looks like, with the widget. I removed the meebo widget for now. This is how it looks on my local system. I am not able to publish it as it requires the server. I am currently running it on my local machine, and hence all that others could see is a server error. If anyone is generous enough to lend me some server space (JSP), or even if the people at Duels take a look at it, others can use it too.
The technical explanation of how i made this follows. Firstly, the assumption is that anyone looking at my blog is not logged into Duels.com. So all I could use is the information on my public avtars page. Another problem that I am having here is that I am not in the same domain as Duels.com (no XHR) , so I will have to use a proxy that gets me the information page, and extracts the data out of the page. That is where the requirement for a server comes to play. I have a JSP sitting on my Tomcat that fetches the page, and extracts out the SWF, path images, my player name and other details. The script is placed using an iFrame with a source pointing to a HTML page on my local machine. Currently, I am only showing only the last duel when the page was loaded.
As an extension, I am also planning to use XHR to update the duels that I have fought and the equipment that I have got. Making the widget show the dynamic details would require a little more work, but tomorrow is a holiday (Indian Independence day), so I am keeping me busy for tomorrow. This weekend, I am also looking at porting this to facebook, something that will allow people to fight directly from facebook. It is a little challenging, and I will definitely require my server to proxy (unless someone is generous to donate a server).
To end, I think that making this is not technically challenging, but in my humble opinion, people would want something like this. So why wait for the developers at Duels.com to show off my DUAL in the DUEL world ??
[If you want to contact me please leave your email ids in the meebo chat box]
