Need Some Help

[mhettinger77]

WARNING NOOB ALERT!!!
I hope I am posting in the right place.
A little about me I am a Firefighter/Gamer/self proclaimed technerd. I made a site for a Group of other Firefighter/Gamers. Should say mudding my way through making a site.

I need some help getting info from one place and have it paste to a website with out having to go in and physically change the page everytime we gain or lose a memeber. Here is the link to what info I want to get http://battalion343.webege.com/Roster.html if any one can help that would be great.
PS
I aslo would like to copy players name and AV to a side panel I have on other pages in the site.

[JorgeM]

Do you have this information stored in a DB? creating a page with server-side scripting would be the easiest way to pull the info from a DB and dispaly it dynamically on your page.

[mhettinger77]

No I do not have a DB. Also, I do not have game sever access. So, I think I need a script that can copy and paste?

[JorgeM]

Ok, so the site that has this information is not your site... I see. It sounds like you want to screen scrape. This really shouldnt be done without the website owner's permission... in any case, you need some server-side scripting, such as PHP on your site, to pull the target page and collect the information you want to display on your page. There are quite a bit of examples on the web.

There are other alternatives, say this information is stored in XML format, you could have your page's server side scripting download the XML data from the target and extract the information needed.

Ditto. Don't use data without permission.
The site may just have a XML/RSS/REST solution. If it does, you're in business. Alternatively you can use cURL to scrape info.
All these require a server-side language to access remote data. If you have hosting with 000webhost.com, I think they offer php/mysql.

[mhettinger77]

I have sent email to designer and waiting on response. I dont need it to be updated 100% of the time. Wanting it to be on-damand. Yes I do have php/mysql but I am lost when it comes to useing it. I am just trying to get ahead.

OK cool. If you need to implement php scripts come over to the forum.

[PhilEaton]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but also, you might be able to implement a RSS feed. I am new to RSS, but that might be a good way to go. Plus XML is fairly simple.

[mhettinger77]

Not sure if an RSS feed would work for a page that list the Team. but I will trying anything. Still waiting on them to say something.

[mhettinger77]

Got some news form the GO and they said that anything I do can not use a lot of bandwith and they will not give server side info out due to it may compromise the game itself.

So you have permission? Sounds like. I'm assuming that you're going to use cURL to scrape data from a specific page - BUT not often. In this case you'd probably need to store the scrape in a file to be updated something like once a day. You can probably do this by running a script (php file) with a 'cron job' but only if your host gives you access to crons. This script should scrape and parse the data and save it to a html or text file. Your site should then access this file as opposed to scraping the remote site every time that page is opened. This way you don't use up too many of the remote site's resources - UNLESS there are hotlinked images / css files or other resources.

That's my way of thinking. Anybody else?

[mhettinger77]

Sorry for the break I went on vacation. I dont even know where to start to do any of what you have posted. This is all new to me I was taking a stab in the dark with what I want to do. So if any one does not mind walking me through what I would need as in the coding or whatever is needed to be done.

cURL: http://www.php.net/manual/en/curl.examples-basic.php

Or here's a html parser: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/

Cron Jobs: http://www.timlinden.com/blog/website-development/php-cron-jobs-with-cpanel/

No point in me typing out what these guys have written.