Make it easier to identify the "right" Comic Series

[GoogleCodeExporter]

It is becoming increasingly difficult to re-scrape the latest issue of a comic 
each week, there should be an easier way to identify which comic is the right 
one.

The proposed solution would be when multiple series are found, display the 
latest issue published date(month/year) and latest issue number (i.e. #405)

This will make it easy to identify new comics and which series they belong in.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by derekhak...@gmail.com on 5 Oct 2010 at 10:40

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Unfortunately, there are limits to the ComicVine API that make it impossible to 
obtain the latest issue number or last published date for a series in a timely 
fashion--see these issues for a more detailed description of the limitations, 
if you are interested:

http://code.google.com/p/comic-vine-scraper/issues/detail?id=56
http://code.google.com/p/comic-vine-scraper/issues/detail?id=105

I just looked through the ComicVine API again, though, and I noticed that there 
IS a way for me to get the "last updated" time for a series, which would often 
correspond fairly closely to the last publication date of the latest issue in 
that series.  

I could use this information to further improve the ordering algorithm (which 
already tries to put the latest issues of a comic book at the top of the series 
list.)  Or I could even added the "last updated" time as a column in the series 
dialog.

I'll look into this more when I have time.   Thanks for the suggestion.

Original comment by cban...@gmail.com on 5 Oct 2010 at 11:16

[GoogleCodeExporter]

i was playing around with the comic vine API today and noticed that there was a 
feature for 'first_issue' and 'last_issue', but it appears that these seem to 
be broken and never return and result:

http://api.comicvine.com/volumes/?api_key=*removed*&offset=1000&field_list=name,
last_issue,first_issue,count_of_issues,date_last_updated

I'll contact the comic vine guys and see if they can fix it!

Original comment by derekhak...@gmail.com on 6 Oct 2010 at 10:52

[GoogleCodeExporter]

For the Series Dialog (where you choose which Series a scraped comic belongs 
to), the goal has always been to have the "right" choice appear at the top of 
the list.  This should happen more often now (as of version 1.0.33) because 
I've made the scraper take the "last updated" time into account (among other 
things) when deciding how to sort the list of available Series.

This change should help mitigate the problem originally described in this issue 
report.  In any event, it is the best I can do until ComicVine improves their 
API and gives me more options!

Original comment by cban...@gmail.com on 2 Jan 2011 at 6:02

• Changed state: Fixed

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by cban...@gmail.com on 2 Jan 2011 at 6:11

• Changed title: Make it easier to identify the "right" Comic Series