| Posted: Monday 27th October 2003 by
Sam |
Well hows this for service...
Last week I was speaking to a very helpful developer at Zen Internet expressing my unhappiness at not-having a direct method of pulling statistics for exchanges. As you may or may not know, I still have to use a phone number to pull data from BT's website - there is no special entrance. Anyway, much to my surprise he suggested that he may have a solution for me.
Less than a week later I get an email with details of a brand new XML based checker which reports the preregistrations, trigger and status for any given exchange (keyed by OLO code). Their tracker updates 6 times a day I'm told (and it certainly looks like it aswell), and it is extremely fast - 1 query takes me 0.3 seconds, which a massive saving compared to BT's system. There is one drawback though; although it will tell you a RFS date is set, it will not actually give you the date. This is something they're working on.
Best of all, this checker is available to anyone who requests it. Drop them an email for more information. Keep in mind that the data returned is in XML format, so it's not completely straight-forward to include it in your site. I'll add an item to the FAQ section about this shortly, which will go into more detail on the technical bits.
The server this site is running on is connected to Zen, and I'm now using their checker, so needless to say, they're my new best friends at the moment! :D
In other news... you may have noticed that development has slowed a bit over the past few days. That's partly because I've been very busy with other work, and also because I've been working on the back-end stuff (like you can see from the above!). There's quite alot of other things in the pipeline which I hope to finish off soon. |