This is it then
Well, my host has given me 72 hours to fix the problem, or be shut down. I can’t afford non-shared hosting, and it’s unlikely anything I can do will fix the issue, so unless something amazing happens in the next 3 days, this is it for Brickley’s words. The main site may stay, along with the gallery if it doesn’t cause the CPU limit to be exceeded, but the LEGO instruction search will be shut down. It’s a pity it came to this, but that’s just the way things go sometimes. Maybe someone else will take over.
November 21st, 2009 at 4:02 am
Hi,
I am very sorry that people have abused your beautiful website in such a way that you had to remove the lego instructions library… Could you maybe send me an e-mail, briefly describing the way you scraped the lego website? I am very familiar with PHP and other programming languages and would really like to help you out by restarting the service at my server, possibly improving it by adding security methods to prevent people from scraping it.
As far as I can see, the lego website uses ASPX code with control callbacks which makes it pretty hard to use the website itself to scan for instructions. The assets folder does not list all of the files … so do you really check every possible instruction number + .pdf , or do you have another method?
Kind regards,
Ronald van der Velden
The Netherlands
November 21st, 2009 at 5:43 am
I check ever 7-digit number starting with 4.