atomic flair

Screen scraping atomicmpc to build my own "flair" system.
March 27 2010

Today I was adding my stackoverflow.com (and associated sites) flair to this blog and thought I might add one for the other site I frequent, forums.atomicmpc.com.au.

Atomic doesn't have "flair" or anything like it, so I thought why not roll my own.  Ok I possibly have infringed on some copyright but I haven't used any atomicmpc logos or anything so I should be ok.  If not, I'm happy to get rid of it.  This was more for my own entertainment.

If you want to add atomic flair to your site or blog, all you need to do is embed an iframe with the with the source to the following location http://atomicflair.sharpstudios.com.au/user/id/0  Where 0 is your user id from the site. To find this out just go to your profiile and look in the url at the showUser querystring value.  Thats your used id.

Embed the following html into your blog and you're good to go.

<iframe src="http://atomicflair.sharpstudios.com.au/user/id/9541" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="210" height="60"></iframe>

There is a limitation.

Caching - there is none, so while your atomicmpc rank and other details don't change often, each page request is going , via the IFRAME, to atomic.  A better solution would be bring the data back as a png and let the user embed that.  That way the img could be cached.

Technical Stuff - The app to generate the data is written in asp.net mvc.  I use a technique known as screen scraping to pull the data back from the atomic website and populate my own AtomicUser instance.

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