CRUCIVERB.COM
Solving => Today's Puzzles => Topic started by: aaron f on January 28, 2019, 03:45:22 PM
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does anyone know what is going on with la times archive?
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I just signed up to get LA Times puzzles and the site seems to have stopped updating LA Times archives for last week or so.
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If the site maintainer is interested, I have a fairly automated way of pulling down LAT puzzles and converting them to PUZ file based on Android shortyz app code in GitHub. I can help set this up if needed.
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See relevant discussion and activity in top two threads under Support (top forum). A couple of members (who are my heroes) have been providing .txt versions that can be easily converted to .puz format by opening them with AcrossLite and saving. They may appreciate your help creating these. There also seems to be a question of how/where to host .puz versions due to copyright issues. "Site maintainer" appears to be AWOL on this issue.
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If the site maintainer is interested, I have a fairly automated way of pulling down LAT puzzles and converting them to PUZ file based on Android shortyz app code in GitHub. I can help set this up if needed.
I'm one of those two that jmh123 mentioned. Like was said, "site maintainer" hasn't talked any about the issue. I may have to directly ask. I'm guessing based on when PUZ files don't post here that there's some kind of manual intervention required on Mondays and the end of the month that doesn't always happen. Also like was said, I don't know the conditions that the Los Angeles Times puts on allowing the puzzle to be distributed here. So it's kinda hard to act with too much freedom with the confidence that there won't be any legal issues in becoming an alternative distribution source.
As for automating the process, the only hitch on my end from doing that is knowing where to download the data from. I presume that a lot of the web applets have XML data files that get downloaded/read to show the puzzle. If I knew how to find the URL to this data, it would probably be trivial for me to automate it from there and get the TXT files that are posted. Though I can say I've learned to be very proficient at assembling those files, so I haven't worried that much about wanting to come up with one.
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Before publishing copyrighted material you need the permission of the copyright owner.
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The source URL of the daily puzzle is in the code for open source android app "shortyz". I can point to it in a PM if needed.
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The source URL of the daily puzzle is in the code for open source android app "shortyz". I can point to it in a PM if needed.
Thanks. I got what I needed. Interesting app - I've had a thought or three about turning out something similar for Windows desktop over the last year or two. But that's for another day.