Lately i get a massive amount of the 503 responses. Even with 2s sleep between characters.

And something even more strange, sometimes i get the characterpages in plain html, no xml. Don't know what's happening there.

I only want to fetch my own server's chars but its failing way to often. I really wonder how wowjutsu does this, i can only think of plain bruteforce try and try again with many different servers/proxys.

Wow-- yes, blazing fast. Interestingly, they cache your request so they seem to be building their own database.

The thing is that the Armory is a database itself and it has XML interface. That's a great thing.

But sure there is things that could be improved in the armory interface.

At least character-sheet.xml has lastModified attribute in its content (example: lastModified="February 18, 2008"). But, as I checked couple months ago, the HTTP Last-Modified header is set to current time. Now I have to get whole XML document and parse it just to find out that the character sheet was not modified.
I have no idea why Blizzard doesn't support HTTP Last-Modified. It's so easy to implement and it would save a lot of traffic/CPU both for Blizzard and armory crawlers.

It appears Blizzard lost the wowarmory.com domain; it's currently producing a godaddy.com parked page instead. The most likely reason is a failure to refresh; I'd guess the armory will be back up on the normal URL soon enough.

I do notice that a lot of websites that use armory data are suffering from issues as well now that the domain doesn't link to the actual armory though, but using the IP addresses for the armory still works. So since it seems fairly relevant to the topic...

US Armory IP: 12.129.242.20
EU Armory IP: 80.239.186.20

Alternatively accessing the armory through the old URL seems to work. That is through either http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com or http://armory.wow-europe.com.

Wow, Armory Lite is amazing and needs to be publicized more. Or maybe not, if that will make it slower!

The only gripe I have with Armory Lite is the not showing of item icons. It's easy to recognise what kind of gear someone is wearing on wow-armory, but here you have to mouse over..

As far as building your own copy of the Armory, Alexa's web search service might be of great interest once it's out of testing.

Here's some technical docs to salivate over, as well.

Does anyone know how to get the enchantementnames from the Armory by id (permanentenchant)?
Thank you

I read all the replies in this topic and I i should thank you all.....
I "build" a reputation calculator in the last few months and while I was close to finish I wanted to find some other ideas for a future "tool". My main idea was to build a cralwer to make some statistics (while everyone loves them). BUT after reading everything here I noticed you are all right and no matter how much do I spent on hardware resources and bandwidth i will never be able to keep a "tool" like that up to date. Even if the Private Armory Database idea is good, even so I dont think we'll be able to make it perfectly synchronized with the wowarmory db

Now, i was wondering, does any of you discussed this "problem" with any Blizzard employee? Anyone got some official answer about some API or some king of db access to the main wow database?

I guess this would be interesting for everyone. I'll wait for your answer(s) and according to you I'll try to to mail them and wait for an answer.

Cheers.

I've sent a mail to blizzard about it, but its really hard to find a good e-mail address.
I didnt get a respons at all on my first mail. and on the second mail they pointed me to the Sugestion Forum where I posted but got no respons (as usual).

Anyone else had any luck?

My website was just included to EU Fan Site program and they gave me a set of emails where i can ask questions and stuff. I guess I'll just email them and see what answer I can get. Let's hope I wont have to wait for a few months to get a reply from them.
Will let you guys know if I know anything.

Cheers.