Well, the MT are making plans to make data available via a published API, but I fear it will be much too inflexible a system to cope with the fine details which my solutions - which have already been proven to work - would, and do, require.
But there is yet another way to get the data from the SOTA system, and it’s a method which I would have thought impossible, or at least unworkable. That method consists of laboriously downloading or scraping the details of all activity of each of the SOTAWatch/database users in turn, one by one, from the database pages themselves. This has in fact been done - not, I hasten to add, by me - and an automated system set up to pull the data at regular intervals has been established.
And here is where I have to thank my very good colleague, Christophe ON6ZQ for his amazing efforts in pulling off this incredible feat. He’s put in a lot of work to get this running and I think we owe him a round of applause for his initiative, energy and skill.
Unfortunately, things haven’t gone so well at my end, where I have struggled to integrate the new data into my own database, and to get it all running in tandem with my copies of the SOTA summits data. It’s always a problem to deal with copies of copies, and to reconstitute a relational database reliably from flat text files where all the data are mixed. And we’re talking of nearly 1 1/2 million records here, which I would have to maintain on my own test machine at home (moderately difficult), as well as on the shared server (difficult due to various restrictions) where the SMP is hosted.
I have to date already created three different versions of the activations page and its’ supplementary files - each time dealing with differently-structured datasets -, and I have to say that each time it’s been a nightmare to manage. This is the reason why I had to put the latest development version of that page on hold, since I was, to put it mildly, exhausted and irritated with the whole thing. It’s taken me a few months to get over it and there’s no easy way forward to make this thing work.
Except one: allow this one-time database administrator (already very familiar with the database type (and, incidentally, the tables and database structure!) used by SOTAWatch) access to the database. There would, in fact, be no real technical obstacles in the way; only issues of a personal, or social, nature. And that’s how it’s going to stay with this MT. As somebody once said on the old forum, the MT are having a party, and if you don’t like the music, you can go elsewhere and find another party.
Anyway, I can still play around with other stuff and try to develop a tool here, an update there, in the SMP: it all keeps “ze little grey cells” active.
In that regard, and in response to a specific request by Christophe (thanks again!) for such a thing, I’ve developed a little tool for mobile-phone or pad use, which simply gets a user’s current location from the device and shows a table of summits within x kilometers/miles of that location. It’s still in development, but seems to work OK: go to http://mobile.sotamaps.org/nearest_simple.php to try it out on your phone browser.
Rob