I kinda like the idea of doing a "What's your favourite?" type thing, people talking about games they are nostalgic about, or still play. I could probably query Twitter for a hash tag and links to the site then display them on a page here.

Yesterday I added webshare to the site, in browsers with javascript and webshare support. It's is currently the a button with a ♥. I think it mainly shows in mobile browsers, and acts like native sharing. Hopefully it could encourage people to share links to the site. I'm going to shuffle the game pages around a bit as well, when that looks a bit better I'll embrace sharing a bit more.

I also added some Open Graph protocol tags so that when the webpage is shared it can look a bit fancier.

I've been trying to set this site indexed by DuckDuckGo so that I can use it's sitesearch feature instead of creating search for myself. DuckDuckGo is just an aggregator, and so doesn't index pages on its own. Instead I've tried to be indexed by Yandex in the hopes that it trickles down into DuckDuckGo.

But now Yandex has locked me out of my webmaster account, because "I could have been hacked or have a virus", but it will all be solved as soon as I give them a phone number. Possibly just for 2FA, but idk. Hopefully it will still index now it has the sitemap, even though I can't log in.

In case that doesn't happen I've submitted my sitemap to Google webmaster and that is slowly crawling the site. If I have to use Google's sitesearch, I guess I will, although it's not ideal.

I've been using a standard "G" for the gamerscore symbol, but it's not exactly pretty and I wanted to change it. Obviously I was going to avoid FontAwesome so I was expecting to have to use an SVG image, and possibly base64 and inline it. That wouldn't have been too bad, but on the off change I did some searching and found Ⓖ and 🅖. They are better than a SVG I could have made, use less data than an SVG I could have found. That's Awesome.

I've started adding some data about game franchises.

I don't think it's something I'm going to do for every franchise, I'm doing this manually. However for the ones I have done it for it allows users to quickly see other games in the same series. I've added it as another link at the bottom of a game page.

Again, saying disabling search implies there was functioning search. There wasn't.

What I had was a HTML form that would push somebody to DuckDuckGo with a site search. I think it's a pretty cool way to do search on a static (Hugo) website, let the search professionals do there thing. I can help, add keywords, alt titles (like cod for Call of Duty), having a sitemap, but let them work it out.

However this site isn't indexed by DuckDuckGo or even Google, so it doesn't work yet. I'll uncomment it out once I'm indexed.

Saying there is a new front page implies there was an old one. There wasn't, but anyway.

A few days ago on 2020-03-14 I added some popular titles to the front page, I used data from Wikipedia not this site, I don't have any stats about what is the most viewed on here. (Nothing, this site has no traffic it's just a personal project)

The GPDs seem to be the thing most people are interested in. So I've put up a new archive, it's the same GPDs as last time but this time I've included the PEC files. It's a Xbox native format, they contain avatar award data. The data is also available in JSON in the repo to this site.

My next 2 goals are to list Avatar Awards, and Gamer Pictures. Avatar Awards should be pretty simple, the same as the achievements. In fact I think I already have the data on my harddrive, just need to parse it. Done.

Gamer Pictures is gonna be harder, as far as I know there is no manifest of published Gamer Pictures. So I'm gonna have to scrape them :(, there is prior art of this, it sucks. I can Improve a little, but not much.

Internally Gamer Pictures are 3 uint32s.

• Title ID (eg 0x415607d1)
• Large Image ID (eg 0x0002 8000)
• Small Image ID (eg 0x0001 8000)

Now, these Image IDs are uints, 4 bytes, 32 bits. But the upper 2 bytes, seem to be flags, for the size of the image. And in all my checks that's the only thing that changes between the different Image IDs. So it's redundant, and makes the common Image ID a uint16.

It's still not great, and at the moment I can't get much better. I'll be grabbing the smaller image, 32px x 32px instead of 64px x 64px. I can possibly use the non TLS server, to reduce handshakes, but only if I control the client. If I do this through a web browser it would have to be TLS, or I'd get mixed content errors for using non TLS data on a TLS site.

But that's it, I think instead of me scrapings 65535 of images, for thousands of titles I'm going to do it in your browser, at least until it's cached. It's not ideal, I don't want to put JavaScript on your system. It's probably not even the best technological solution, but it's the best I can do.

If anyone has data on Xbox 360 publishers, I'd really appreciate it. I'm trying to get a name for all of the publishers IDs.

The publishers ID is 2 ASCII characters, it's forms part of the title ID. For example "AV" is the ID for AV-2001, Activision. And Activisions first Xbox 360 title is AV-2001, Call of Duty 2.

2,691 titles, with 78,556 achievements, worth 1,870,625 cred.

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