Cheek

egnix, Do you have a copy of this program available? What is it written in? Could i take a look at the source code? How is the data output set up? Into a text file -- CSV or tab delimited? Do you currently have it set up to run frequently to keep updated information? Do you have some sample output I can play with? Sorry for all the questions; i must have missed your previous post. ~CHeek

I know it's a little late, but I just saw the project, and thought I'd give it a shot - Also, it seems that there isnt much headway happening for it. Here is what i was thinking. The project has two distinct parts... 1) Pulling out the current coordinate information for a cache. Since we know that they're all starting in the same spot, we have the first coordinate. We periodically run a program that downloads the source for the each TBug page, and parses through looking for either "Recently spotted: In geocache" or "Recently spotted: In the hands of". If it finds "in the hands of", it marks the bug as traveling, and leaves the record alone. If it finds "In geocache" then, it follows the link to the cache page, and pulls out the current coordinates, and updates the entry in a database or text file. 1a - ok, so i lied, but this is a subpoint of 1) The coordinates are then converted into decimal degrees. If you take the furthest point of the US in all directions, and log these decimal degree waypoints, you can use them to find out what percentage into the us east a given tbug is, and what percentage south it is. - This information is also written to the DB/.txt. 2) Using flash (maybe).. you read in the percentages and convert this to a percentage in pixels of a map. Then, if you make a symbol (or instance of) for each tbug, you can set the X&Y location properties of the symbol to overlay the top of the map. This creates a dynamic system where the map is updated automatically by running a single program. This program could be run every few hours via crond, or windows task scheduling. I'm working on the app to pull out the coordinates right now. Process is a little slow as this is also my first VB program (i'm mostly a design guy). Currently I am able to process wether or not is traveling, but having a hard time getting the source of a cache page. It seems to want to load up http://www.geocaching.com/hideandseek instead. Once i can get the cache page, all that is left is to write to a file, and figure out how to convert from degree-minute-second format to decimal degrees. Let me know what you (anyone who understands what i'm talking about) think. Any help would be most appreciated. I'm not sure if the whole system will work or not; I'm most sketchy about the flash bit, as I havent really ever done much actionscript. ~Cheek