One thing that has been eating away at me for my deck list posts is that they don’t link to card info on Gatherer.

I did try a plug-in for WordPress. But it wasn’t really that easy to integrate into my editing process. I had to tag stuff by hand. Plus the plug-in didn’t seem to be updating with WordPress releases to make sure it was secure.

So the plain lists with no links has been the default after that brief trial.

That sense of the deck lists could be better stuck with me.

So today I spent some time automating a process that takes a Deckbuilder deck list, and turns that into some HTML for me that I can copy and paste into a post.

Years ago I had a similar process for my “diary” when it first started up using vbscript to generate the HTML for my photos that I’d taken on walks and trips, and the updated menus for the site. All I had to do was take the HTML and copy it into the web pages. Which then got uploaded to the server. This was pre-Wordpress days. What I had was almost a very basic CMS made up of vbscript that I ran.

Today using Pythonista on my iPad I can write a python script that can read in a Deckbuilder deck list, go through the file and build up a line of HTML for each card used in the deck that when clicked takes you to the WotC Gatherer web page for the card.

For those interested or remotely curious here is the code (screen shot sadly, it’s the only way at the mo I can share the code so it is formatted correctly). Push comes to shove email me and I’ll send the file to you. Eventually I’ll put it on github once it’s finished.

The next thing to do with this script is to get it to present the information in the same format as if I’d used the Deckbuilder share deck text option. At the moment the list is ungrouped, no structure.

I hope some found this peek behind the curtain of interest.