Public Project Euler Dashboards

Project Euler doesn't support any kind of public stats for users, which is kind of lame I thought.  I posted about it on the Project forum and got no response, so I built my own: http://barneyb.com/projecteuler/.  The code is a total hack, faking a login to grab the protected profile page and then doing some string ripping, an xmlParse, and a few xmlSearches on the returned HTML to extract the relevant data.  However, it works quite well, and with how stable their site's backing code seems to be, I'm not terribly concerned.

The first version just showed my stats (it had my tokens hard coded).  The current version has the ability to create a dashboard for any user via the new link at the bottom of the page.  You have to supply either your credentials or your browser cookies so the server can get your data, but there isn't any server-side storage of anything.  The URL token that identifies the dashboard as yours also carries the tokens needed to fetch data from Project Euler.  If needed, they're extracted at runtime and used.

Whether anyone will ever use it, who knows, but it was an interesting set of problems to deal with.  Also be good to clean up the URLs a bit, but didn't figure it was worth it at this point.

One response to “Public Project Euler Dashboards”

  1. duncan

    You're already ahead of me… I might have to try and get back into it, maybe tackle some of the ones you've managed.