Greetings all,

I know there have been a few folks out there anxious for this, and hopefully this will bring some new folks in the mix to do some new and exciting things with their favorite CCG out there. CCG Services (formally known as the netrep API) is now back online for Alpha testing.

Okay.... So what does this do for me?

It provides a quick and easy way for you to integrate CCG data into your existing website / blog / something-new-and-awesome with minimal headaches.

Sounds great! How do I get to it?

You can reach the services by going to the following web addresses:

Card Services - http://dillieodigital.net/webservices/CardServices.asmx

Rulings Services - http://dillieodigital.net/webservices/RulingsServices.asmx

Sounds cool! How do I sign up to get started and are you going to charge me to use this?

No need to sign up right now, just start using the URLs provided to get at the data. Most likely there will be a small fee to use the services down the road. It depends on how the demand and actual service use plays out. The main justification for charging is that having multiple users will eat up my bandwidth limits pretty fast and most likely I will need to have more bandwidth added to my account. It also helps pay for my kids' college fund. 8^D

Why are you doing this anyway? Aren't you going to pull people away from your own site as they make their own stuff?

When I started out creating Deck Studio, the goal was to be  a "by duelists, for duelists" type application and I've tried to maintain that spirit and goal in the other applications as the CCG Toolkit has grown. There have been a lot of contributors to the TCR over the years, and for that I'm extremely grateful and I believe they deserve access to this data as well in some form or another. In addition, I know there are a lot of small teams, forums, clubs, etc. out there, and I think having a quick and easy way to integrate card data into there site will go a long way to help keep their own groups flourishing.

How many times has somebody said on a site "So I played card X and my opponents face just dropped" and you (or somebody else) had no idea what the card did. So the person replied with one of four responses: 1. A brief description of the card that may not have been too helpful 2. A hand typed version of things that had some typos in it or missed some details 3. A quick copy/paste from another website, that didn' t look pretty, or 4. Hey noob! If you don't know then get away!

Having something like the API would help with that. I think this could help store owners as well not have to deal with scanning and entering card data for cards they want to sell. Just simply drop in the API details of the card and list your price. Done.

Okay okay, enough soap box babble, gimme the specs.

There is a simple page on each of the links listed above. that will allow you to test each service by entering test data. Currently the own CCG online for the services is Yu-Gi-Oh, and that code is YGO. Image services aren't online yet and will function in a slightly different format. Currently the following methods are available:

• Card Services:

Get Card By Name: Returns the details of the card by simply providing the name. For instance, if you enter the name Kuriboh (I'd use Kozaky, but he's rather bland for the rest of the examples 8^D) you get the following details back:

Get Card Source By Name: Returns all the card sources for a card by specifying the name. If you enter the name Kuriboh, you get the following details back:

• Rulings Services:

Get Rulings by Card Name: Returns all the rulings for a given card name. If you enter Kuriboh, you'd get the following details back:

"Zut Alors! What in the heck is THAT stuff on the screen?!"

The CCG Services are XML web services, which means you'll be getting XML back. This is designed to be used "under the hood" with your scripting language of choice, or even with an XSLT file (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) to take the raw data and make it something pretty. I am working on creating a user friendly version of the services, that would essentially generate a "badge" or HTML block of code that you simply had to drop into your site to give you the card image and the text.

I want to get the services out there at this point to make folks aware of them and to let those interested start do some testing. For those of you that are familar with this kind of stuff, you'll also notice on the links to the services there is also a link to the WSDL document, so you should be able to use your language/tool of choice to easily consume the services for use.

So please give things a whirl and let me know what cool stuff you come up with or what errors you find. I'll be happy to list the cool stuff somewhere on the site. I hope you enjoy!