 | | | | | | |
| |
|
As noted here, there is a BSBackup
utility for Windows that helps you batch download the contents of Brickshelf
galleries. (This is of interest at the moment due to Brickshelf’s imminent
closure.) I’ve written a quick hack to accomplish the same thing on Mac OS X.
Download bscrawl.tcl (7k)
This is a command line script. (Hypothetically, it may also work with Linux or
Windows if you have Tcl and tcllib.) I recognize this is not the ideal Macintosh
interface, so I’ll write an AppleScript wrapper sometime soon that you can just
click when you’re viewing a gallery you’d like to back up.
Assuming you’ve downloaded the script to your desktop, open the Terminal
application and enter the following commands to move to your desktop folder and
make the script executable:
cd Desktop
chmod +x bscrawl.tcl
|
|
Now you can retrieve your Brickshelf gallery with the following command:
./bscrawl.tcl -m username -dir MyBrickshelf
|
|
where username is your Brickshelf username and MyBrickshelf is a folder you
have created on the desktop to contain your Brickshelf files (you can, of
course, provide a different directory). The script works recursively, so that
your Brickshelf folder hierarchy is reconstructed in the local directory.
If you only want to back up the contents of a particular folder (and its
subfolders), use a command like this:
./bscrawl.tcl -f 233717 -dir ~/Documents/MyFavoriteFolder
|
|
Where 233717 is the folder id you see in the Brickshelf URL for that gallery.
You can also download a gallery (either a folder or a whole account) by
specifying its URL:
./bscrawl.tcl -url http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=233717 -dir ~/Documents/MyFavoriteFolder
|
|
Use the -pause option to specify how many seconds to idle between downloads:
./bscrawl.tcl -f 233717 -dir ~/Documents/MyFavoriteFolder -pause 5
|
|
That summarizes the usage. A few notes:
- Both image and data files are downloaded (.ldr, .txt, .mov, etc.)
- Folder descriptions and keywords are not retrieved
- Existing local files are skipped, so you can efficiently “update” a local backup by reissuing the initial command (it won’t notice changes to the same filename, though). Kind of useless since nothing new is going on Brickshelf now, although this could certainly be adapted for maj.com
- Multi-page folders are handled
- Basic progress messages are printed to the terminal
- Very dependent on Brickshelf’s current HTML format
- It was written in an evening, so there’s been negligible testing. I’m sure there are bugs. You accept that at your own risk. Some of the code isn’t very well thought out, either, but it works for me.
I hope some of you find this useful. Let me know how it works for you. As I
mentioned, I’ll try to make it more user friendly in the next few days.
Jim
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Jim DeVona wrote:
| |
Download bscrawl.tcl (7k)
This is a command line script. (Hypothetically, it may also work with Linux
or Windows if you have Tcl and tcllib.) I recognize this is not the ideal
Macintosh interface, so I’ll write an AppleScript wrapper sometime soon that
you can just click when you’re viewing a gallery you’d like to back up.
|
Here’s a very rudimentary application that does the same thing for those who
aren’t comfortable using the Terminal:
Download
BrickshelfBackup.app.zip (26k; probably requires Mac OS X 10.4, as does the
bscrawl.tcl script)
Double-click the Brickshelf Backup program to retrieve the Brickshelf gallery
you are currently viewing in Safari. (In other words, first go to the Brickshelf
page you want to download - either a user gallery or a folder - and then launch
this little app.) The program will ask you where to save the backup. It will
then appear to do nothing while it downloads the gallery. In the meantime you
may safely close or navigate away from the page in Safari. An alert will
announce when the backup is complete.
I recommend the command line version because of its greater flexibility and the
fact that you can monitor the progress messages. Were there more time, I might
invest more effort in the interface. As it stands, I hope this is useful.
Jim
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Jim DeVona wrote:
| |
As it stands, I hope this is
useful.
|
Whoa, Jim, this was awesome. Thanks so much:-)
JOHN
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Thanks for that Jim. I got the script working for user backup, and Peter
Bartfai (the author of the original script) also got one working for user backup
(before seeing my email that I’d gotten it working). However, while I haven’t
looked at Peter’s yet, mine definitely appears more difficult to use than yours.
It requires wget (which Mac OSX doesn’t ship with), so it would have to be
distributed in a DMG for Mac users.
I’ll probably post the scripts somewhere anyway, so that at least Linux people
can them it if they so desire.
The original script grabbed all .ldr, .mpd, and .dat files from all of
Brickshelf, and I ran that last night, so at least none of the CAD models will
be lost. I don’t really have the ability to host them at the moment, but I may
make them available at some point in the future.
--Travis
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Travis Cobbs wrote:
| |
Thanks for that Jim. I got the script working for user backup, and Peter
Bartfai (the author of the original script) also got one working for user
backup (before seeing my email that I’d gotten it working). However, while I
haven’t looked at Peter’s yet, mine definitely appears more difficult to use
than yours.
|
Well, I had the advantage of writing it from scratch specifically for this
purpose. It’s funny because I had been thinking about writing a Brickshelf
upload utility (like Flickr Uploadr) but
circumstances resulted in a download utility instead.
| |
It requires wget (which Mac OSX doesn’t ship with), so it would
have to be distributed in a DMG for Mac users.
|
On the other hand, Mac OS X does come with
curl, so maybe it could be
adapted to use that.
| |
I’ll probably post the scripts somewhere anyway, so that at least Linux
people can them it if they so desire.
|
OK. The more the merrier! (I think that Tcl and
tcllib come with some Linux distributions,
too, but I don’t know for sure, so a plain shell script could be a useful
alternative.)
| |
The original script grabbed all .ldr, .mpd, and .dat files from all of
Brickshelf, and I ran that last night, so at least none of the CAD models
will be lost. I don’t really have the ability to host them at the moment,
but I may make them available at some point in the future.
|
Wow! I can see how that would be a useful script for testing LDView, too.
Speaking of hosting LDraw files - what exactly is the story with the
“Official Model Repository”? Is there any
such actual repository? If not, would this be a good time for the LDraw
community to implement the idea? (Forgive my ignorance if this topic has been
resolved one way or the other - I’m just curious.)
Anyway, Brickshelf must be going out with a bang as far as bandwidth is
concerned.
Jim
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| |
| |
It requires wget (which Mac OSX doesn’t ship with), so it would
have to be distributed in a DMG for Mac users.
|
On the other hand, Mac OS X does come with
curl, so maybe it could be
adapted to use that.
|
There are many instructions how to install wget and even some installers. curl
can’t beat ‘wget -m’ afaik.
| |
Speaking of hosting LDraw files - what exactly is the story with the
“Official Model Repository”? Is there
any such actual repository? If not, would this be a good time for the LDraw
community to implement the idea? (Forgive my ignorance if this topic has been
resolved one way or the other - I’m just curious.)
|
No official repository afaik. Last I heard was that we want to build it, but
that requires a developer with the time to build it!
| |
Anyway, Brickshelf must be going out with a bang as far as bandwidth is
concerned.
|
Does anyone know the chances of just taking all the Brickshelf files and hosting
them somewhere else? Not brickshelf’s functionality, just the files? That way
they can be left up for much longer than July 31st.
James
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, James Reynolds wrote:
| |
| |
| |
It requires wget (which Mac OSX doesn’t ship with), so it would
have to be distributed in a DMG for Mac users.
|
On the other hand, Mac OS X does come with
curl, so maybe it could be
adapted to use that.
|
There are many instructions how to install wget and even some installers.
curl can’t beat ‘wget -m’ afaik.
|
I didn’t have any problem compiling and installing wget (although I did have to
change the default install path by hand from /usr/local to /opt/local so that it
would be in my pre-existing path). However, I suspect that most Mac users would
be averse to doing that. Having said that, here is Peter’s sh script (all 844
bytes of it):
http://www.halibut.com/~tcobbs/ldraw/private/bsbackup.sh
To use the above script, run it with the URL of the gallery you want backed up
as the only argument on the command line. I think it will only work if it’s in
the current directory when you run it. Also, it seems to only back up images
(not sure why that is). Make sure to put quotes around the URL on the command
line, since brickshelf URLs usually include a question mark, which the shell
will try to interpret.
Example:
./bsbackup.sh "http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=169512"
As mentioned, you must have wget installed on your system (which is there by
default on most Linux distros). This script doesn’t use the -m option, and
could be (fairly easily) modified to work with curl. I haven’t done that,
though, and don’t plan to.
--Travis
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Travis Cobbs wrote:
| |
it’s in the current directory when you run it. Also, it seems to only back
up images (not sure why that is). Make sure to put quotes around the URL on
|
OK, if you download and run the script now, it should back up all files (not
just images).
--Travis
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
&tIn lugnet.general, Travis Cobbs wrote:
Boy, that is a lot more compact than mine!
| |
Also, it seems to only back up images (not sure why that is).
|
It looks like it’s only considering links to /cgi-bin/gallery.cgi. However,
links to non-image files from the Brickshelf folder pages point directly to
/gallery/username/foo/bar.dat. (Ah, I see you have fixed this.)
| |
Make sure to put quotes around the URL on
the command line, since brickshelf URLs usually include a question mark,
which the shell will try to interpret.
|
That advice probably stands for my script’s -url option as well.
| |
As mentioned, you must have wget installed on your system (which is there by
default on most Linux distros).
|
For anyone interested, I can confirm that wget 1.10.2 builds on my Mac with the following:
./configure
make
make install
|
|
As Travis noted, though, if you don’t have a /usr/local directory (as I do)
you may want to configure a different installation location.
For what it’s worth, I just did an informal comparison between this script and
mine. I timed the download of my account with each script. Keep in mind that
network variations and in particular Brickshelf’s heavy traffic make this a
relative comparison, not an absolute measure.
cd ~/bsbackup-test
time ./bsbackup.sh "http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=anoved"
|
|
This took 24:32 (using the initial version which did not retrieve my LDraw
files).
time bscrawl.tcl -url "http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=anoved" -dir ~/bscrawl-test -pause 0.01
|
|
This took 31:20 to download all my files.
So, it looks like your script is a bit faster as well as a bit smaller.
Jim
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Jim DeVona wrote:
| |
For what it’s worth, I just did an informal comparison between this script
and mine. I timed the download of my account with each script. Keep in mind
that network variations and in particular Brickshelf’s heavy traffic make
this a relative comparison, not an absolute measure.
cd ~/bsbackup-test
time ./bsbackup.sh "http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=anoved"
|
|
This took 24:32 (using the initial version which did not retrieve my LDraw
files).
time bscrawl.tcl -url "http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=anoved" -dir ~/bscrawl-test -pause 0.01
|
|
This took 31:20 to download all my files.
So, it looks like your script is a bit faster as well as a bit smaller.
|
Of course, I just tried bsbackup.sh again - the current version that gets all
files - and it took 32:05. There’s a little quicktime movie in there that
probably accounts for most of the difference as the MPD files are quite small.
So the actual performance difference may be negligible.
And now I’ll stop wasting bandwidth.
Cheers,
Jim
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Jim DeVona wrote:
| |
As noted here, there is a BSBackup
utility for Windows that helps you batch download the contents of Brickshelf
galleries. (This is of interest at the moment due to Brickshelf’s imminent
closure.) I’ve written a quick hack to accomplish the same thing on Mac OS X.
|
Thank you Jim! This was great and saved me a lot of time :)
-Anne
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
In lugnet.general, Jim DeVona wrote:
| |
- Multi-page folders are handled
|
Yesterday I realized that while my script handled multi-page folder galleries
(URLs like f=1234), it did not handle multi-page user galleries (URLs like
m=username). This has been fixed and “version 1.1” is now available at the
same address previously given. The AppleScript version has been updated, too.
This fix has not really been tested.
Jim
| | | | | | |
