Announcing Pennypacker!

A couple of months ago I recognised that to be any sort of respectable web developer I needed to have 1. a Google Maps mash-up and 2. a Greasemonkey extension under the belt. Pennypacker is my attempt at the latter. As the name may suggest, it's an extension for the brilliant Penny Arcade comic, providing tagging and favourites functionality to the comic pages. Read on for more details.

Pennypacker is a Greasemonkey extension with a difference. It comes with a sister web application that it communicates with by means of an AJAX API. After installing the extension, browsing to any comic page on Penny Arcade will cause the PP extension to look-up that comic from the sister website. If that strip had been previously viewed by someone using the extension, the server will return any tags added to it as well as the number of times it has been favourited. If not, the comic will be added to the PP database. This turns out to be a nice way to build up the database, letting the users do all the work, and avoids the need to screenscrape or otherwise manually catalog PA.

The real value of Pennypacker is in the way it will open up the 8 years of Penny Arcade archives. Currently the only way to browse old comics is by moving back and forth, one strip at a time. You must start from either the first or last comic, with no way to jump in mid-stream. Tags really make sense in this context, especially given Penny Arcade's much loved recurring characters (Fruit Fucker, Cardboard Tube Samurai, and Catsby & Twisp to name a few).

You can get started at http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/