Hi Everyone!
In prior years I’ve put together a compilation of resource links ahead of Pinburgh specifically for the games being used at the event. It’s been my goal for a while now to expand it beyond Pinburgh to any and all games out there and I’ve finally gotten around to a very basic framework that I wanted to share for feedback ahead of Pinburgh this year.
http://pinballspinner.com/links/
What is it?
PinballSpinner is a compilation of resource links for various pinball games. It includes links to awesome resources like PinTips, PinballVideos, IPDB, Pinside, 60 Second Tutorials, and Rulesets from various sources.
It is spearheaded by the OPDB concept being lead by @haugstrup which allows us to tag a resource as specific to the game (i.e AC/DC Back in Black Edition) or to the “family group” the game belongs to (i.e. any AC/DC).
What’s Improved Over Prior Versions?
Using OPDB, we now have about 1,900 machines available that potentially have resources attached to them.
You can see all the games here:
http://pinballspinner.com/links/machinelinks.php
At a minimum, all games have a link back to PinTips, even if no tips currently exist for that game.
There is also the ability for a person to create their own custom bank for a event or location.
http://pinballspinner.com/links/makeabank.php
When you generate a bank, it creates a URL where all the information is stored in the string that can be copied and pasted and shared ahead of an event.
Here is an example for this weekend’s Silverball Rumble at Pintastic for games in the Main Bank:
Here’s another for PinCrossing, a location close to my home:
At the moment, there’s no ability to log in and save a bank, as Custom Banks are currently read-only against the source database. That being said, when a URL is generated, all the information in the URL itself making it easy to share (albeit with a long URL). We also have a page that looks at popular banks that are getting a lot of hits across the past 96 hours: http://pinballspinner.com/links/popularbanks.php
The site is currently in Beta as we get ready for Pinburgh. Structures and links may change. In the meantime, any feedback can be provided to pinballspinner@gmail.com or chatted about here.
Future enhancements:
The immediate focus is getting the site ready for Pinburgh, where we’ll have pages dedicated to the Main Bank, Intergalactic, and hopefully the WIPT (if those machines are known ahead of time).
I’m currently waiting to hear back from Pinside regarding their API so I can easily grab the URL links for their machines.
We’ll also look to add the ability to save banks and have short urls associated with those banks. A lot of that will take place after we move everything over to a more modern web framework.
We have also set up a Patreon for anyone interested to support the site: https://www.patreon.com/pinballspinner
Reach out if you have any thoughts, and if you find any issues with the links on the site be sure to drop a note to pinballspinner@gmail.com so we can queue up a ticket to get it corrected.
