HTML Tidy

I used HTML tidy to normalize the HTML output of the two directories. This step formats the HTML files consistently and helped reduce false positives.

I was happy to see that HTML tidy has been resurrected, on Ubuntu I installed it with

apt-get install tidy

I ran tidy against all the HTML files in each output directory. I used the default configuration and it worked fine for me

find . -name '*.html' -type f -print -exec tidy --warn-proprietary-attributes false -mq '{}' \;

Diff

You can compare two directories at the command line and pipe the output to a text file for review. Once you’re familiar reading diff output, you can make sense of the lines that are different. I ended up using the –exclude and –ignore-matching-lines flag to get rid of lines which were different due to cache-busting flags or machine-generated CSS and JavaScript filenames. Doing so helped focus to find changes that matter.

diff -burw html/ html-new-nav/ > html-diff.txt

This diff output was useful for identifying which files were actually different. To see the changes in specific pairs of files, I like using a visual diff utility like WinMerge, Meld, or the diff built-in to PHPStorm.

One feature missing, which is quite specific to role playing games (and maybe some board games) are rolling on random tables. Not being able to find one that could be hacked to do the job, I’ve been working on a custom plugin to do just that. It’s finally where I feel comfortable releasing it, in case others might find it useful. You can see how to install it and use it on RandomTables plugin page.

Based on a reference image from https://www.instagram.com/shieldmaiden_larp/

Delg is the Life domain cleric I’m playing in our Saturday’s game when we run through Dungeon of the Mad Mage. He’s been fun to play, except the first game Intellect Devourers ate his brain, so he had to be resurrected. He also picked up a curse sword, but the rest of the party was kind enough to chop of his hand before resurrecting him, thus ending the curse.

At the end of the day, I initially got it working by using curl from the command line, then parsing the headers it spits back. The switches are s, k, and capital i). That makes the initial request and returns the headers without following any Location headers

exec( "curl -skI " . escapeshellarg( $url ), $output );

But, I really wanted to know it could be done without dropping to the shell. And of course, there is a way to do it, using stream filters. I got tripped up in creating the context. At first, I had max_redirect and follow_location in the ssl block, but they were ignored. I didn’t realize you could specify options across “protocols” but it is totally doable—all with native PHP functionality:

$url = "https://www.oscarm.org";

$opts = [
    'ssl' => [
        'method' => 'GET',
        'verify_peer' => false,
        'allow_self_signed' => true,
    ],
    'http' => [
        'max_redirects' => 1,
        'follow_location' => 0,
    ],
];

$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$stream = fopen($url, 'r', false, $context);

// header information as well as meta data
// about the stream
$headers = stream_get_meta_data($stream);
var_dump($headers);